So Google bought Urchin, that’s old news.

Before the acquis­tion, Perth­Web bought a licence of Urchin 5, the stand-alone edi­tion, for our host­ing ser­vice. It’s a nice prod­uct, I’ve sung it’s praises here before.

We bought it at the end of a sales quar­ter, the Urchin rep even rang me from the US to make sure he closed the sale, and his big sell­ing point was that we could get a 20% dis­count if we bought a one year sup­port pack­age, which inci­dently cost 20% of the total price. Essen­tially we paid full price and got the sup­port pack­age free. The attrac­tion of the sup­port pack­age was that we would get a free upgrade to the new ver­sion, which was com­ing out “real soon” and appar­ently included many of the fea­tures of Urchin 6 hosted edi­tion. It was a good deal and we took it. I even used the sup­port ser­vice a cou­ple of times, when I was get­ting my head around cus­tom lookup tables and other cool features.

After Google took over though, things changed. The sup­port email address stopped work­ing, the online form which replaced it ate my email and the sup­port phone num­ber dis­ap­peared off the web site. Even­tu­ally I did get sup­port by email­ing the sales address and whing­ing — but the online form still doesn’t even send me a con­fir­ma­tion email and my mes­sages don’t get through. The promised update never came.

And now, the hosted ver­sion has been rebranded as Google Ana­lyt­ics and is now free. Great, right? Except the stand­alone ver­sion has all but dis­ap­peard — a note that I found linked from Google’s “Fea­tures” page says that the stand-alone soft­ware and sup­port are avail­able through “Google Ana­lyt­ics Part­ners”. The Aus­tralian part­ner doesn’t even have it men­tioned on their site.

So while it’s great that they’re giv­ing it away, I still want actual log file analy­sis. I mean, a JavaScript bug is not telling you about search engine spi­ders crawl­ing your site, for starters, and that’s impor­tant information.

What’s going to hap­pen to the stand­alone Urchin? I’m not feel­ing very opti­mistic about the whole thing.