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Google's new Ajax-powered search results breaks search keyword tracking for everyone

88 points by imp 18y ago

misterbwong 18y ago
This is a potentially huge problem. Google is effectively cutting off all other search analytic packages from their information.
- jorgeortiz85 18y ago
  No, they're not. It's not like they're deliberately obfuscating the information in order to shut everybody else out. They've made a technology decision which will probably significantly speed up searches and result in increased revenues for them. Google shouldn't be beholden to other people's business models. That said, given the amount of referrals that Google generates, and how important referral information is for a lot of things online, as a courtesy Google should probably communicate this to the web-at-large before rolling it out on a massive scale. However, they're not "cutting off" other search analytic packages. At worst they're forcing a rushed bugfix.
  - cakeface 18y ago
    Yes they are cutting off other search analytic packages. If there is no tracking of the search term in the referring url then the analytics package has no way to determine what keywords were used to bring a user to the page. Since google provides one of the most commonly used analytics packages, Google Analytics, and owns another, Urchin, I would think that they would be the last ones to try this.
    - jorgeortiz85 18y ago
      Ahh, I stand corrected. This is what I get for only reading half the article. Yeah, sucky problem. I guess we'll have to wait for Firefox 5 and IE 10 to have support for hashtags in referrals. EDIT: My point still stands that Google shouldn't be beholden to others for their technological/business decisions. Though of if it's deliberate it certainly tightrope-walks the "Don't be Evil" line.
      - sam_in_nyc 18y ago
        Hashtags in referrals will not happen. That would break a great deal of things, considering an unencoded "#" in the URL is not expected by nearly any server side scripting language. It would probably be treated as part of last GET parameter.
    - durin42 18y ago
      I thought Urchin became GA? I remember early on in my analytics use the script mentioned urchin, and the newer one they provide doesn't anymore...
      - cakeface 18y ago
        I think that Urchin was the basis for GA. Urchin is still available from google here though http://www.google.com/urchin/ http://www.google.com/urchin/. The main difference that I know of between them is that Urchin has the ability to parse server logs as well as track users through javascript.
  - sant0sk1 18y ago
    They aren't obfuscating the information, they're removing it altogether. As an analytics provider, you cannot 'bugfix' a lack of information. You're just hosed. Probably what would have to happen is for the browsers to allow for passing data after # symbols the same way they do after ? symbols. That means updating every major browser to support this. At the speed of browser development, many analytics providers may be out of business by the time that happens.
- sam_in_nyc 18y ago
  Who is this a problem for? It's going to improve search results because now SEO gamers have less data to work off of. If you're a website, you should know damn well what keywords your website attracts... and you shouldn't be tweaking things around just to trick Google into sending you more traffic. Now web sites can focus on creating content, and google can focus on creating good search. Both parties will benefit at the cost of spammy SEO gaming websites, who are now blind and will be pushed to the bottom.
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
sant0sk1 18y ago
Just wow. I'm really starting to anti-trust Google.
- modoc 18y ago
  Really? I mean how much should they hold themselves back in order to maintain support for other products? I know they're huge, but it's still a free product/service, they shouldn't have to retard their progress to avoid breaking other products. If they decided to stop supporting IE (while potentially bad business) I'd support their right to do so. What exactly do they owe you?
  - sant0sk1 18y ago
    Yes they have the right. No they don't owe me anything (save the service I pay them to provide, which is moot to this discussion). But it is my trust and they can still lose it. The fact is that I believe this to be shady, and for a company whose motto is "Don't be evil", they raise the standard for trusting them. A standard which I don't believe they are meeting.
    - anthonyrubin 18y ago
      Do you honestly believe that their intent is to somehow deprive you of information? How exactly is this shady?
      - schammy 18y ago
        Yes. Google damn well knows that no major web browser sends the #hashmark part of the URL in the referrer. They damn well know this breaks every single analytics package out there.
        anthonyrubin 18y ago
        So you believe that Google did this on purpose and it isn't a limitation of the browsers?
th0ma5 18y ago
the standard is the referrer being in the HTTP headers, not specifically that if the referrer is google, that it must include the search terms used in their search we seem to be putting more reliance on these flimsy things... in the future will i create an outage because i @somebody instead of #something on twitter?
- ComputerGuru 18y ago
  In the case of web browsers, we don't even SEE the stuff that comes after the # So it's not like putting "@someone" instead of "#someone" but rather like putting "" instead of "#someone" See the difference+
  - th0ma5 18y ago
    sorry, maybe a bad example on my part, my point is that querystring parameters being passed should include the search terms used on that search engine is something of a rule of thumb more so than a standard... but i don't know that there are any standards built on top of the http referrer other than this is how google and many others operated, so these reporting companies wrote code that relied on that, rather than coding to a standard.
    - ks 18y ago
      I can see your point, but if Google adds that capability to Google Analytics they will have a significant advantage over their competitors. So the question is not simply about following an unofficial standard.
      - eli 18y ago
        How would they even do that if there's no query data in the referer? Set a cookie on google.com and then read it back from analytics.google.com is the only thing I can think of.
  - mbreese 18y ago
    Not really no. If the web browser isn't sending the information, then take that up with your browser... it's the one that has the information and is dropping it. Then again, I should point out that I'm not seeing this behavior, so this may be much ado about nothing.
ewiethoff 18y ago
Hmmm. I'm not seeing this new "feature" when I search Google. I've turned on Javascript, I'm accepting Google cookies, I've even logged in. And I still see the usual http://www.google.com/search?q=ajax+crap http://www.google.com/search?q=ajax+crap results URL. I'm running Firefox 3.0.5. Anyone know what triggers the new search results?
- raquo 18y ago
  Probably (and hopefully) it's just being bucket-tested...
- ivank 18y ago
  Google selecting your cookie for the test run.
dchest 18y ago
See how there's a hash mark # in there now, and the "q=test" is after it? The problem is that web browsers don't send anything after the # in the referrer string. I wonder why they don't send it in referrer string. Are there any technical or security reasons?
- lacker 18y ago
  Originally the content after the # was only used for automatic scrolling to particular tags within a page, so there was no need to ever send it to a server. Once Ajax came around, people realized you could use javascript to read the url after the # and do arbitrary stuff based on it. So you can show different pages at foo.com/ foo.com/#bar but since the server doesn't treat them differently, when the user transitions from one to the other, there's no page reload. So you can move from page to page, but cut n pasting links still works. There are libraries like RSH that let you do this to speed up your site.
  - sqs 18y ago
    Seems to me that browsers ought to start including the fragment (the part after the #) in the referrer, now that different fragments can refer to entirely different pages. I can't see any security issues, as the previous poster was wondering.
    - lacker 18y ago
      There would be security issues if any existing website has put confidential user data after the #, expecting that no other website would see this in the referers. This doesn't seem typical, but still I'm sure some websites would have security issues if this was changed. Also, practically speaking, even if all browser developers agree this was a good thing, it takes quite a long time for people to upgrade their browsers.
    - deleted 18y ago
      [deleted]
peregrine 18y ago
Google is a business who wants you to use their analytical service over others. They have no obligation to you send you the information their users are using to find your site.
- gojomo 18y ago
  Google is also arguably close to being a effective monopoly in web search. Antitrust law prohibits using monopoly power in one market (eg search) to acquire a monopoly in another market. So there's a bit of a bind for Google: strategies that were perfectly legal when they were up-and-coming become illegal at some point of dominance. But there's no 'bright line' for when the rules change -- market definition, thresholds, and acceptable practices can all be argued after the fact. A naturally competitive company is almost certain to keep the 'pedal to the metal' until it's too late.
  - madh 18y ago
    Is there ever really a "too late"? Shouldn't Google push for dominance as far as it possibly can? Isn't it some other entity's role to stop them?
    - gojomo 18y ago
      Depends on how the risk and costs of antitrust punishment compare to the benefits of 'full speed ahead'.
      - jonursenbach 18y ago
        If Google ever gets split up in an antitrust case, they'll most likely pull a T-1000 and reemerge years down the line the same way that AT&T did.
    - dejb 18y ago
      > Shouldn't Google push for dominance as far as it possibly can? If they want to live up to their 'Don't be Evil' motto then they should do it with better products and services not by cutting others down. In the long term I think that will work out better for them. > Isn't it some other entity's role to stop them? You could also run that argument for a gangster or any type of criminal I suppose.
three14 18y ago
Many of the comments seem to assume that websites are entitled to know what I searched for. I think that it would be a great step to give millions of people a little more privacy, even if it's just an accidental side effect of a change to Ajax.
- dejb 18y ago
  I feel that the benefit in letting webmasters know what their users are looking for outweighs any privacy gains to be had. If people are that concerned about their privacy they could always set their browser to not send the referrer. I doubt that this move has anything to do with concern over user privacy.
  - deleted 18y ago
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- tjpick 18y ago
  making it about privacy is playing an emotional card when it should really be a technical discussion. Hiding a query string isn't "privacy" in any meaningful sense. It's beneficial for you to tell a webmaster what it is that you have come looking for. I'm in two minds about the issue though. Google don't have a contract to supply the searchterm on outgoing links (via the referrer or otherwise) but for many applications it was a pretty useful thing for them to do. Arguably their only resource there is a single search page which is dynamic depending on your query string - to me this says ?q=searchterm is the semantic way to represent it, but hey it's their application so they can "design" it however they want. On the other hand, urls are about as explicit as you can get on the web and google's are more publicised than most. Changing your public API is asking for trouble.
  - semiquaver 18y ago
    It's beneficial to the webmaster, not the user. If most people were presented with a choice of whether or not to provide this information, they'd decline.
rgrieselhuber 18y ago
Surprised to see this as the keyword reports are a big part of Google Analytics as well.
deleted 18y ago
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raquo 18y ago
I can't really see how google can easily pass the search query to Google Analytics. GA requires atomic data to perform all this analysis and custom segmentation magic. The only way I see is using a cookie (with a user id) on the google.com domain, which ga.js must interpret in backend on every request. But this means that ga.js will have to be dynamically generated, rather than being a simple static file (and yes, it won't be cached by users visiting your site, making tracking even slower). I don't think google wants this additional load every time anyone loads some GA-enabled page on the web. Besides, ga.js is currently hosted on google-analytics.com, not google.com, so all users will need to upgrade to a new tracking script. And it will not be possible to self-host the script anymore. Anyway, this does not sound like anything reasonable to me. I hope it won't be implemented - it would destroy an entire industry, and not a redundant one.
- schammy 18y ago
  When you click a link from a google SERP, it goes through a redirect script. They could easily be using that to feed Google Analytics.
  - raquo 18y ago
    Yes, but in that case other web analytics packages will also have access to referrer that contains the search query and there is no problem. I wasn't clear enough, sorry - I was concerned with how Google could be able to share the search query _only_ with GA but not other analytics tools, because it is clear that Google will not sacrifice GA usefulness to some ajax SERPs.
    - dshah 18y ago
      I might be missing something, but I think Google can easily modify their redirect script to store the data they want (for use by Google Analytics) and then strip that data out before it hits the target URL.
- sam_in_nyc 18y ago
  ga.js can be static, and can read cookies. You go to Google and do a search, Google stores your search sessions on the server, and assigns you some unique ID. If you click on a search result, google logs that in your session. You visit site with Google Analytics. ga.js reads the Google.com cookie to get your session ID in some clever way (perhaps embedding an invisible iframe in the Google.com domain, which can read the Google.com search cookie). Now, Google Analytics knows that you're the same person who just clicked on that search result .2 seconds ago... a match in my book. They could also tell you things like "visitors to your site also search for XXX" but that's clearly a violation of privacy. They get this data, but we don't.
braindead_in 18y ago
Nightmare scenario. What if analytics goes paid?
redorb 18y ago
I just looked at the Source for google.com's new search result page, You can't read 1 word of english off it - totally Ajax. Looks amazingly complex.
parenthesis 18y ago
Is anyone not getting this on google.com ? It looks like it might be happening for everyone on google.com, but not on, e.g. google.co.uk or google.it .
- raquo 18y ago
  I don't get anything ajaxy on google.com Even if I go directly to http://www.google.com/#q=test http://www.google.com/#q=test it redirects me to http://www.google.com/search?q=test&cad=h http://www.google.com/search?q=test&cad=h
  - semiquaver 18y ago
    http://www.google.com/#q=test http://www.google.com/#q=test sends me to a blank google search with no results.
tlrobinson 18y ago
Google could easily fix this by redirecting through some sort of shim script. But will they?
deleted 18y ago
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andrewf 18y ago
Google has ~65% of the search market. The other 35% is probably still representative enough for you to figure out what the population is searching for that leads to your website.
- imp 18y ago
  The problem with that is that your search ranking for any given key word is probably different in each search engine.
randomwalker 18y ago
I believe the problem is bigger than what the article points out. Under the new scheme, all search results pages have the same URL. The part after the hash not part of the URL, it is a fragment or anchor. It breaks my firefox extension that nukes searchwiki. It breaks my custom CSS for the search results page (see userstyles.org). I often bookmark google search results in del.icio.us. Depending on how such services are implemented, different search results pages might show up as the same page. I'd guess there's just a lot of code out there that assume search results are separate URLs, and that's going to break. Those two breakages are simply due to the regex identifying the search results pages not matching anymore, and are easily fixable.
- sam_in_nyc 18y ago
  Search results to the old ?q= google will still work: http://www.google.com/search?q=test http://www.google.com/search?q=test
sam_in_nyc 18y ago
There are a variety of things which I don't think anybody has noted. First of all, for those without Javascript, the old Google page is used. So, you'll still see some sampling of keywords coming in... albeit only 2% of what it originally was. So it's not totally ruining things. You'll still get some sample of referring keywords. The benefits to Google are more than anybody is reading into. It is definitely an intentional move to cloak their redirects and keywords. And it definitely increases performance for them. Performance gains: The back/forward buttons do not cause anything to be reloaded. This should save a nice percentage of page loads which were along the lines of "what was my last search?" and going back and forth between pages. If you look at Firebug, the Ajax request is actually going to the proper google search page... google.com/search?q=... Google is taking the entire search page and essentially replacing it without a page refresh. This doesn't really mean anything significant, it's just a neat observation. Strategy: More than anything, in the long run this will improve search results. It's not about locking down the "analytics" arena... as one poster noted, they probably won't be able to show Google search terms either (unless they set a cookie on the Google search page, and read it on GooAnal [yes, GooAnal] pages, which might actually happen). The important thing is: SEO gamers now do not have access to which google keywords work and don't work. Without giving SEO gamers which keywords are working and which aren't, it's going to be a lot tougher to game the system. These SEO firms that manage to get the spammiest crap on the top pages won't have much to work off of other than the raw amount of visitors coming from google. I imagine that Google has secretly rolled out quite a few significant changes in their search algorithm as well, to work in tandem with keeping analytics in the dark. My prediction is, in a few months, you'll be thanking Google for the much better search results. I welcome this change with open arms, because I'd much rather see quality content rise to the top, rather than gamed content targeted at keywords. The trade-off that people running websites won't be able to see referring keywords... well I guess Google might lose .001% of their market share.
- deleted 18y ago
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- schammy 18y ago
  "My prediction is, in a few months, you'll be thanking Google for the much better search results." I don't really think this is going to change anything. How is this going to affect SEO? I doubt any of them use referrers logs - waste of time. They scrape the SERPs. The old SERPs are still available. They can tell when a rank goes up or down. How is this going to change that?
lacker 18y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Google. This is not about analytics. This is just an experiment to test if using ajax instead of the typical form submit can make the result page load faster. Here's an official statement - We’re continually testing new interfaces and features to enhance the user experience. We are currently experimenting with a javascript enhanced result page because we believe that it may ultimately provide a faster experience for our users. At this time only a small percentage of users will see this experiment. It is not our intention to disrupt referrer tracking, and we are continuing to iterate on this project. http://searchengineland.com/google-ajax-search-results-death-to-search-term-tracking-16431 http://searchengineland.com/google-ajax-search-results-death...
YoavShapira 18y ago
Nice to get a comment from Google right away, though.

88 points by imp 18y ago

This is a potentially huge problem. Google is effectively cutting off all other search analytic packages from their information.

jorgeortiz85 18y ago
No, they're not. It's not like they're deliberately obfuscating the information in order to shut everybody else out. They've made a technology decision which will probably significantly speed up searches and result in increased revenues for them. Google shouldn't be beholden to other people's business models. That said, given the amount of referrals that Google generates, and how important referral information is for a lot of things online, as a courtesy Google should probably communicate this to the web-at-large before rolling it out on a massive scale. However, they're not "cutting off" other search analytic packages. At worst they're forcing a rushed bugfix.
- cakeface 18y ago
  Yes they are cutting off other search analytic packages. If there is no tracking of the search term in the referring url then the analytics package has no way to determine what keywords were used to bring a user to the page. Since google provides one of the most commonly used analytics packages, Google Analytics, and owns another, Urchin, I would think that they would be the last ones to try this.
  - jorgeortiz85 18y ago
    Ahh, I stand corrected. This is what I get for only reading half the article. Yeah, sucky problem. I guess we'll have to wait for Firefox 5 and IE 10 to have support for hashtags in referrals. EDIT: My point still stands that Google shouldn't be beholden to others for their technological/business decisions. Though of if it's deliberate it certainly tightrope-walks the "Don't be Evil" line.
    - sam_in_nyc 18y ago
      Hashtags in referrals will not happen. That would break a great deal of things, considering an unencoded "#" in the URL is not expected by nearly any server side scripting language. It would probably be treated as part of last GET parameter.
  - durin42 18y ago
    I thought Urchin became GA? I remember early on in my analytics use the script mentioned urchin, and the newer one they provide doesn't anymore...
    - cakeface 18y ago
      I think that Urchin was the basis for GA. Urchin is still available from google here though http://www.google.com/urchin/ http://www.google.com/urchin/. The main difference that I know of between them is that Urchin has the ability to parse server logs as well as track users through javascript.
- sant0sk1 18y ago
  They aren't obfuscating the information, they're removing it altogether. As an analytics provider, you cannot 'bugfix' a lack of information. You're just hosed. Probably what would have to happen is for the browsers to allow for passing data after # symbols the same way they do after ? symbols. That means updating every major browser to support this. At the speed of browser development, many analytics providers may be out of business by the time that happens.
sam_in_nyc 18y ago
Who is this a problem for? It's going to improve search results because now SEO gamers have less data to work off of. If you're a website, you should know damn well what keywords your website attracts... and you shouldn't be tweaking things around just to trick Google into sending you more traffic. Now web sites can focus on creating content, and google can focus on creating good search. Both parties will benefit at the cost of spammy SEO gaming websites, who are now blind and will be pushed to the bottom.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]

sant0sk1 18y ago

Just wow. I'm really starting to anti-trust Google.

modoc 18y ago
Really? I mean how much should they hold themselves back in order to maintain support for other products? I know they're huge, but it's still a free product/service, they shouldn't have to retard their progress to avoid breaking other products. If they decided to stop supporting IE (while potentially bad business) I'd support their right to do so. What exactly do they owe you?
- sant0sk1 18y ago
  Yes they have the right. No they don't owe me anything (save the service I pay them to provide, which is moot to this discussion). But it is my trust and they can still lose it. The fact is that I believe this to be shady, and for a company whose motto is "Don't be evil", they raise the standard for trusting them. A standard which I don't believe they are meeting.
  - anthonyrubin 18y ago
    Do you honestly believe that their intent is to somehow deprive you of information? How exactly is this shady?
    - schammy 18y ago
      Yes. Google damn well knows that no major web browser sends the #hashmark part of the URL in the referrer. They damn well know this breaks every single analytics package out there.
      - anthonyrubin 18y ago
        So you believe that Google did this on purpose and it isn't a limitation of the browsers?

th0ma5 18y ago

the standard is the referrer being in the HTTP headers, not specifically that if the referrer is google, that it must include the search terms used in their search we seem to be putting more reliance on these flimsy things... in the future will i create an outage because i @somebody instead of #something on twitter?

ComputerGuru 18y ago
In the case of web browsers, we don't even SEE the stuff that comes after the # So it's not like putting "@someone" instead of "#someone" but rather like putting "" instead of "#someone" See the difference+
- th0ma5 18y ago
  sorry, maybe a bad example on my part, my point is that querystring parameters being passed should include the search terms used on that search engine is something of a rule of thumb more so than a standard... but i don't know that there are any standards built on top of the http referrer other than this is how google and many others operated, so these reporting companies wrote code that relied on that, rather than coding to a standard.
  - ks 18y ago
    I can see your point, but if Google adds that capability to Google Analytics they will have a significant advantage over their competitors. So the question is not simply about following an unofficial standard.
    - eli 18y ago
      How would they even do that if there's no query data in the referer? Set a cookie on google.com and then read it back from analytics.google.com is the only thing I can think of.
- mbreese 18y ago
  Not really no. If the web browser isn't sending the information, then take that up with your browser... it's the one that has the information and is dropping it. Then again, I should point out that I'm not seeing this behavior, so this may be much ado about nothing.

ewiethoff 18y ago

Hmmm. I'm not seeing this new "feature" when I search Google. I've turned on Javascript, I'm accepting Google cookies, I've even logged in. And I still see the usual http://www.google.com/search?q=ajax+crap http://www.google.com/search?q=ajax+crap results URL. I'm running Firefox 3.0.5. Anyone know what triggers the new search results?

raquo 18y ago
Probably (and hopefully) it's just being bucket-tested...
ivank 18y ago
Google selecting your cookie for the test run.

dchest 18y ago

See how there's a hash mark # in there now, and the "q=test" is after it? The problem is that web browsers don't send anything after the # in the referrer string. I wonder why they don't send it in referrer string. Are there any technical or security reasons?

lacker 18y ago
Originally the content after the # was only used for automatic scrolling to particular tags within a page, so there was no need to ever send it to a server. Once Ajax came around, people realized you could use javascript to read the url after the # and do arbitrary stuff based on it. So you can show different pages at foo.com/ foo.com/#bar but since the server doesn't treat them differently, when the user transitions from one to the other, there's no page reload. So you can move from page to page, but cut n pasting links still works. There are libraries like RSH that let you do this to speed up your site.
- sqs 18y ago
  Seems to me that browsers ought to start including the fragment (the part after the #) in the referrer, now that different fragments can refer to entirely different pages. I can't see any security issues, as the previous poster was wondering.
  - lacker 18y ago
    There would be security issues if any existing website has put confidential user data after the #, expecting that no other website would see this in the referers. This doesn't seem typical, but still I'm sure some websites would have security issues if this was changed. Also, practically speaking, even if all browser developers agree this was a good thing, it takes quite a long time for people to upgrade their browsers.
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]

peregrine 18y ago

Google is a business who wants you to use their analytical service over others. They have no obligation to you send you the information their users are using to find your site.

gojomo 18y ago
Google is also arguably close to being a effective monopoly in web search. Antitrust law prohibits using monopoly power in one market (eg search) to acquire a monopoly in another market. So there's a bit of a bind for Google: strategies that were perfectly legal when they were up-and-coming become illegal at some point of dominance. But there's no 'bright line' for when the rules change -- market definition, thresholds, and acceptable practices can all be argued after the fact. A naturally competitive company is almost certain to keep the 'pedal to the metal' until it's too late.
- madh 18y ago
  Is there ever really a "too late"? Shouldn't Google push for dominance as far as it possibly can? Isn't it some other entity's role to stop them?
  - gojomo 18y ago
    Depends on how the risk and costs of antitrust punishment compare to the benefits of 'full speed ahead'.
    - jonursenbach 18y ago
      If Google ever gets split up in an antitrust case, they'll most likely pull a T-1000 and reemerge years down the line the same way that AT&T did.
  - dejb 18y ago
    > Shouldn't Google push for dominance as far as it possibly can? If they want to live up to their 'Don't be Evil' motto then they should do it with better products and services not by cutting others down. In the long term I think that will work out better for them. > Isn't it some other entity's role to stop them? You could also run that argument for a gangster or any type of criminal I suppose.

three14 18y ago

Many of the comments seem to assume that websites are entitled to know what I searched for. I think that it would be a great step to give millions of people a little more privacy, even if it's just an accidental side effect of a change to Ajax.

dejb 18y ago
I feel that the benefit in letting webmasters know what their users are looking for outweighs any privacy gains to be had. If people are that concerned about their privacy they could always set their browser to not send the referrer. I doubt that this move has anything to do with concern over user privacy.
- deleted 18y ago
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tjpick 18y ago
making it about privacy is playing an emotional card when it should really be a technical discussion. Hiding a query string isn't "privacy" in any meaningful sense. It's beneficial for you to tell a webmaster what it is that you have come looking for. I'm in two minds about the issue though. Google don't have a contract to supply the searchterm on outgoing links (via the referrer or otherwise) but for many applications it was a pretty useful thing for them to do. Arguably their only resource there is a single search page which is dynamic depending on your query string - to me this says ?q=searchterm is the semantic way to represent it, but hey it's their application so they can "design" it however they want. On the other hand, urls are about as explicit as you can get on the web and google's are more publicised than most. Changing your public API is asking for trouble.
- semiquaver 18y ago
  It's beneficial to the webmaster, not the user. If most people were presented with a choice of whether or not to provide this information, they'd decline.

rgrieselhuber 18y ago

Surprised to see this as the keyword reports are a big part of Google Analytics as well.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

raquo 18y ago

I can't really see how google can easily pass the search query to Google Analytics. GA requires atomic data to perform all this analysis and custom segmentation magic. The only way I see is using a cookie (with a user id) on the google.com domain, which ga.js must interpret in backend on every request. But this means that ga.js will have to be dynamically generated, rather than being a simple static file (and yes, it won't be cached by users visiting your site, making tracking even slower). I don't think google wants this additional load every time anyone loads some GA-enabled page on the web. Besides, ga.js is currently hosted on google-analytics.com, not google.com, so all users will need to upgrade to a new tracking script. And it will not be possible to self-host the script anymore. Anyway, this does not sound like anything reasonable to me. I hope it won't be implemented - it would destroy an entire industry, and not a redundant one.

schammy 18y ago
When you click a link from a google SERP, it goes through a redirect script. They could easily be using that to feed Google Analytics.
- raquo 18y ago
  Yes, but in that case other web analytics packages will also have access to referrer that contains the search query and there is no problem. I wasn't clear enough, sorry - I was concerned with how Google could be able to share the search query _only_ with GA but not other analytics tools, because it is clear that Google will not sacrifice GA usefulness to some ajax SERPs.
  - dshah 18y ago
    I might be missing something, but I think Google can easily modify their redirect script to store the data they want (for use by Google Analytics) and then strip that data out before it hits the target URL.
sam_in_nyc 18y ago
ga.js can be static, and can read cookies. You go to Google and do a search, Google stores your search sessions on the server, and assigns you some unique ID. If you click on a search result, google logs that in your session. You visit site with Google Analytics. ga.js reads the Google.com cookie to get your session ID in some clever way (perhaps embedding an invisible iframe in the Google.com domain, which can read the Google.com search cookie). Now, Google Analytics knows that you're the same person who just clicked on that search result .2 seconds ago... a match in my book. They could also tell you things like "visitors to your site also search for XXX" but that's clearly a violation of privacy. They get this data, but we don't.

braindead_in 18y ago

Nightmare scenario. What if analytics goes paid?

redorb 18y ago

I just looked at the Source for google.com's new search result page, You can't read 1 word of english off it - totally Ajax. Looks amazingly complex.

parenthesis 18y ago

Is anyone not getting this on google.com ? It looks like it might be happening for everyone on google.com, but not on, e.g. google.co.uk or google.it .

raquo 18y ago
I don't get anything ajaxy on google.com Even if I go directly to http://www.google.com/#q=test http://www.google.com/#q=test it redirects me to http://www.google.com/search?q=test&cad=h http://www.google.com/search?q=test&cad=h
- semiquaver 18y ago
  http://www.google.com/#q=test http://www.google.com/#q=test sends me to a blank google search with no results.

tlrobinson 18y ago

Google could easily fix this by redirecting through some sort of shim script. But will they?

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

andrewf 18y ago

Google has ~65% of the search market. The other 35% is probably still representative enough for you to figure out what the population is searching for that leads to your website.

imp 18y ago
The problem with that is that your search ranking for any given key word is probably different in each search engine.

randomwalker 18y ago

I believe the problem is bigger than what the article points out. Under the new scheme, all search results pages have the same URL. The part after the hash not part of the URL, it is a fragment or anchor. It breaks my firefox extension that nukes searchwiki. It breaks my custom CSS for the search results page (see userstyles.org). I often bookmark google search results in del.icio.us. Depending on how such services are implemented, different search results pages might show up as the same page. I'd guess there's just a lot of code out there that assume search results are separate URLs, and that's going to break. Those two breakages are simply due to the regex identifying the search results pages not matching anymore, and are easily fixable.

sam_in_nyc 18y ago
Search results to the old ?q= google will still work: http://www.google.com/search?q=test http://www.google.com/search?q=test

sam_in_nyc 18y ago

There are a variety of things which I don't think anybody has noted. First of all, for those without Javascript, the old Google page is used. So, you'll still see some sampling of keywords coming in... albeit only 2% of what it originally was. So it's not totally ruining things. You'll still get some sample of referring keywords. The benefits to Google are more than anybody is reading into. It is definitely an intentional move to cloak their redirects and keywords. And it definitely increases performance for them. Performance gains: The back/forward buttons do not cause anything to be reloaded. This should save a nice percentage of page loads which were along the lines of "what was my last search?" and going back and forth between pages. If you look at Firebug, the Ajax request is actually going to the proper google search page... google.com/search?q=... Google is taking the entire search page and essentially replacing it without a page refresh. This doesn't really mean anything significant, it's just a neat observation. Strategy: More than anything, in the long run this will improve search results. It's not about locking down the "analytics" arena... as one poster noted, they probably won't be able to show Google search terms either (unless they set a cookie on the Google search page, and read it on GooAnal [yes, GooAnal] pages, which might actually happen). The important thing is: SEO gamers now do not have access to which google keywords work and don't work. Without giving SEO gamers which keywords are working and which aren't, it's going to be a lot tougher to game the system. These SEO firms that manage to get the spammiest crap on the top pages won't have much to work off of other than the raw amount of visitors coming from google. I imagine that Google has secretly rolled out quite a few significant changes in their search algorithm as well, to work in tandem with keeping analytics in the dark. My prediction is, in a few months, you'll be thanking Google for the much better search results. I welcome this change with open arms, because I'd much rather see quality content rise to the top, rather than gamed content targeted at keywords. The trade-off that people running websites won't be able to see referring keywords... well I guess Google might lose .001% of their market share.

deleted 18y ago
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schammy 18y ago
"My prediction is, in a few months, you'll be thanking Google for the much better search results." I don't really think this is going to change anything. How is this going to affect SEO? I doubt any of them use referrers logs - waste of time. They scrape the SERPs. The old SERPs are still available. They can tell when a rank goes up or down. How is this going to change that?

lacker 18y ago

Disclaimer: I work at Google. This is not about analytics. This is just an experiment to test if using ajax instead of the typical form submit can make the result page load faster. Here's an official statement - We’re continually testing new interfaces and features to enhance the user experience. We are currently experimenting with a javascript enhanced result page because we believe that it may ultimately provide a faster experience for our users. At this time only a small percentage of users will see this experiment. It is not our intention to disrupt referrer tracking, and we are continuing to iterate on this project. http://searchengineland.com/google-ajax-search-results-death-to-search-term-tracking-16431 http://searchengineland.com/google-ajax-search-results-death...

YoavShapira 18y ago

Nice to get a comment from Google right away, though.