Well, contrary to fears that Google would price Urchin out of the smaller end of the market, it has now opened it up for sites with less than 5 million impressions per month....

http://www.google.com/analytics

For sites over 5 million impressions per month, the site is required to be a member of the AdWords program...

A rather interesting development. I wonder what the roadmap going forward is for folks that would prefer to run Urchin 5 privately on their servers.

Any SM Staff have any comments on this?

I love this new war between Microsoft and Google. I'm having a hard time keeping up with all the free stuff the two giants are rolling out!

Hmmm, mind running down a list of those freebies?

Google seems to be getting hammered right now btw...can't get logged in to see how they have implemented this.

Microsoft Live has lots of free things. Free small webhosting I hear, free Internet to POTS callls like Skype. Their new Gmail killer. They just bought out FolderShare and are offering it for free now. https://www.foldershare.com/index.php

Yahoo has Flickr or whatever. Other stuff too.

I can't even begin to list all the free stuff Google is rolling out.

I'm game.

That's pretty neat software, even more so as it's free!

After trying the two side by side on one of my sites, it looks as though reporting on the google implementation of the service is waaaaaaay below what my server side urchin is reporting.

Visits per day reported by Google: 630
Non-bot visits per day reported by server-side Urchin: 1199

The one google report I found useful is the breakdown of new vs. returning users, which Urchin 5 doesn't really differentiate.

Google's implementation is undoubtedly hurt by its dependence on the client-side downloading of the urchin tracking module, which a lot of people block javascript, but still, I doubt the number of people blocking javascript is as high as 48%.

I haven't used Urcin much, so I can't really do a feature-to-feature comparison, but from what I've seen so far, Google Analytics seems to be a hundred times easier to use and set up.

They've googlified the interface, which is nice (simpler, easier). They replaced SVG (Which is still very difficult to use with firefox 1.0.x) with Flash, which does the same things and pretty much everybody has installed. They removed the server-log parsing, which was annoying and confusing to set up (Not to mention it was unreliable).

Installation is as simple as creating an account and pasting some code into your HEAD tag.

I like. Google done good.

EDIT: I should mention that their requirements of an adwords account is reasonable. I mean, the minimum amount you can spend on AdWords is what, like $5 per month? $5 is pretty reasonable for a site getting 5 million pageviews per month; my old site had double that traffic at its peak, and $5/mth was peanuts compared to ad revenue.