The Google request is for Google Analytics. It gathers things like how long you're visiting the site, what pages you go to, browser usage, etc. This information is available to us, but we didn't want to have to write our own analytics tools when Google's are excellent.
This call isn't new, either, we've been using it for some time.
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Ok. I got the impression that the data was being collected by Google exclusively (as I've seen on other sites), good to know they sell/provide such tools.