Google and Urchin

The folks at Google have decided to buy Urchin, the web analytics firm. Urchin provides both hosted and shrink-wrapped solutions for analyzing web site traffic. Urchin has some monster customers including (according to their site), P&G, NBC, SBC, EDS, and lots of other three-letter acronyms.

What's it mean?

If you operate a commercial web site, Google intends to provide you with all of the infrastructure you need to be successful. Google's AdWords campaign managment application drives traffic to your site. Urchin will help you analyze that traffic to improve ROI. Google's AdSense helps you generate revenue from that traffic, aside from any other revenue you may be earning from your core business.

What's next?

My guess is that Google will be entering the hosting business in a big way. Google's Blogger is already a free, lightweight hosting solution. Expect more heavyweight (fee-based) hosting solutions using Google's outrageously scalable infrastructure, coming soon to a web site near you.