avinash.vora ★

I dismissed the large number of blank search referrers in my site’s logs from Google today as unimportant; I didn’t think much of it. But I stumbled upon this article that explains that Google’s new AJAX search results use anchors instead of query strings—anchors don’t show up in logs (the browser doesn’t send them in the referrer string)!

There’s a few issues here that I feel are worth addressing:

1. Will Google Analytics sort this problem out for itself? I think so. If so, then I think that this is one of the smartest moves in recent memory from the web giant—if not one of the most unethical. In one fell swoop, Google essentially made every single web analytics package (with the exception of its own) useless.
2. Obviously someone at Google knows that this is happening—they’re too large and have too many clever employees to be ignorant of this—and they may decide that the backlash of killing off search requests might not be worth it, so there might be some new method for web developers to access the information. I can’t think of what that might be, but why were the changes not rolled out with this new method? Millions of requests were probably lost because the software couldn’t decipher the requests.
3. While I understand the personal frustration of web analytics software developers, it’s interesting to note that they entered a market where they have to rely on a competitor for survival. It sucks, but it’s business. It’s hard to fault Google for looking out for itself.
4. I wonder if the people who are siding with Google here would be siding with, say, Microsoft here in the same situation.

I for one am not happy about this because I don’t use Google Analytics. I don’t get nearly enough traffic to care about losing a day’s worth of search referrals¹ so if Google pushes a change I’m OK.

As usual, email with thoughts.