Bye-bye Urchin, hello Google Analytics

In March of this year, Google bought Urchin, one of the better web traffic analysis tools on the market and we've all been kind of wondering what exactly they were going to do with it.

We got our answer today when Google launched their Google Analytics and now when you try to reach www.urchin.com you get forwarded directly to their Google Analytics top page.

And it's free for all AdWords users!
(If you'd like to read about it in Japanese for some reason)

This should be wonderful news, right?

Maybe, maybe not.
Let's look at what this means to us.

Google will now have, in their databases, a full account of all of our web traffic and where it's coming from as well as a wealth of other statistics and figures about our sites.
Google will now have a neatly organized view of which site visitors found the site from organic search terms and from p.p.c., and from which p.p.c. engines.

I'm sitting here asking myself "How much do I trust Google?"
Until now, the answer was usually "very much".

But do I really want Google to know exactly how many visitors I get from Overture (Yahoo! Search Marketing)?

And do I really want them to know EXACTLY how many of my visitors come from organic S.E.O. results and what that means to me?

Do I want them to have information like "CPC vs Organic Conversion" attached to my site name in one simple report?

Sure, they can track click-throughs from their main search result pages already, but do I really want to hand them the information as to how much that means in sales for my sites?

Do you?

See, Google, as "good" as they are, is a business trying to sell advertising.

If they figure out that well optimized sites spend less on AdWords because of the revenues they generate from the organic result click-throughs, who's to say they won't "tweak" the organic results to force sites to spend more on AdWords as a result of lost click-throughs because of lower rankings?

Businesswise, it would make sense for them to do that.

However, as a non-spamming search engine marketer, even if it made sense to me that they would and can do that, it's not something that I'd particularly like to see happen.

So just how much can we trust this wonderful new highly informative free service Google is now offering, albeit rather buggily today?

I have no idea.
And to be honest, I'm a little wary of it.

And it's something that's making me go "Hmmmmmmmmmmm...." today.