Half of the top 10,000 websites on the internet currently have Google Analytics installed, according to new research from web monitoring firm Pingdom.

The company looked at the top sites as determined by web information provider Alexa and also found that 40 per cent of Google Analytics users have still not transferred from the old Google Analytics script, urchin.js, to the new one, ga.js.

Pingdom said that this latter statistic is "very important" as Google moved its development to the ga.js script over 12 months ago.

Some of the companies still using the old script include Google-owned sites Blogger.com and Doubleclick.com, as well as IGN.com, Foxnews.com, Match.com, Wired.com and PCWorld.com.

According to Pingdom, sticking to the old version could have significant repercussions for websites as Google stopped maintaining urchin.js in December 2007 and is expected to pull the script out of service later this year.

Julien Coquet of LBi told Pingdom that it is likely the script will begin returning a 404 file not found error once it is decommissioned, meaning that it will stop registering website traffic.

Earlier this year, a report from CMS Watch indicated that Yahoo! Web Analytics may be a better fit for some enterprises than Google Analytics, as it offers better access control options, larger default monthly page-view limits and the ability to export raw, unaggregated data.