Paul Muret - Chief Executive Officer: Paul is the lead architect of both the company vision and the product engineering effort. Paul personally wrote the first version of Urchin in early 1997, and to this day has a direct hand in the overall development of the core technology. Prior to co-founding Urchin, Paul worked with the NASA-funded Space Physics Group at the UCSD School of Engineering, where he wrote analysis and visualization software for large-scale simulations conducted at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Paul holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from UCSD.

Google announced late Monday that it has agreed to acquire Urchin Software Corporation, a San Diego, California based web analytics company.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Urchin is a web site analytics solution used by web site owners and marketers to better understand their users' experiences, optimize content and track marketing performance. Urchin tools are available as a hosted service, a software product and through large web hosting providers. These products are used by thousands of popular sites on the Internet.

Google plans to make these tools available to web site owners and marketers to better enable them to increase their advertising return on investment and make their web sites more effective.

"We want to provide web site owners and marketers with the information they need to optimize their users' experience and generate a higher return-on-investment from their advertising spending," said Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president of product management, Google. "This technology will be a valuable addition to Google's suite of advertising and publishing products."

The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions. Google anticipates that the acquisition will close before the end of April.