Urchin, a well-known web analytics tool that runs on hundreds of thousands of websites, has been acquired by Google. While many in the search industry are surprised by this move, I see it as more of a calculated strategy of Google's to gain access to as much of the information available about websites as possible.

The monitoring and web tracking technology provided by Urchin is offered in both free and paid versions, and with Google's acquisition, I foresee a push of both of these through the company's offerings to webmasters - probably AdWords & AdSense programs, as well as the Google webmaster pages. The goal, as I see it, would be to use statistically important data culled from Urchin to get a better sense of who is using the websites and how.

The information could help Google in their quest for increased search relevancy by giving insight into what succeeds and fails for web visitors as a group and individually. The tracking of conversions, visit length, number of clicks could dramatically increase the amount of data Google has access to regarding the behavior of visitors to search results. Could this impact rankings in the future? My guess is that it could, but it's probably a good ways off. To be safe, however, I think I'll stay away from Urchin, unless I have fantastically performing sites that I want to show to Google...