Oh, what an entangled web 'G' weaves ...

The university home page search I created over the weekend was interesting from a number of perspectives, but perhaps one of the most interesting insights to be gleaned from it involves the depth to with Google has entangled itself with higher education's use of the web. Almost 70% of those sites I captured data from mention Google somewhere in the source of their home page. Meanwhile, more than half of them appear to use Google Analytics. Of course, this is just home page data ... a whole range of sub sites exist within the context of a university's web presence and their authorship, governance and oversight are often highly distributed. One might imagine many more touchpoints interspersed throughout the vast spectrum of web pages hosted by a university. I'd love to get empirical data on this (and other use cases) from a broader, deeper sample ... and who knows, maybe I'll find the time.

Just two years after launching the analytics service for "free", we've seen widespread market adoption of Google Analytics. That's pretty amazing growth! I can't imagine what one might derive about individual browsing behavior from an aggregation of all that data over the course of two or three years (or decades) .... now that would be really fascinating to delve into.

I also wonder what this could mean for the evolution of open source alternatives like Piwik, AWStats and the like -- and for commercial offerings of organizations like those from Ominture and others. It will also be interesting to monitor the evolution and penetration of services like CrazyEgg, ClickDensity, and their open source counterparts like ClickHeat.