I'm guessing that the deliberate skip the HTTP intermediate page to reduce latency on mobile clients. If you are on something like GPRS or Edge, that extra hop

I'm guessing that the deliberate skip the HTTP intermediate page to reduce latency on mobile clients. If you are on something like GPRS or Edge, that extra hop could add a lot of latency. It's a trade-off between ensuring a good user experience (fast page loads) and a good website owner experience (full referer data). FWIW, I find the HTTP intermediate step a tad annoying (it makes copy-and-pasting a result from Google a bit more awkward), but I can see why it's there.