Upcoming Change to Search Referrals for Google.com
Posted at 3:37pm EST on 04/15/2009
Google is changing the string it sends as a referral to sites. How does this affect you? Indirectly, it won’t, but it will affect your analytics.
This is what the string used to look like,
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=google+inside&btnG=Google+Search
This is what it will look like,
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=google+inside&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw
Question and Answer Time
Q: Is change going to be immediate or will it roll out over time?
A: The new referrer URLs will initially only occur in a small percentage of searches. You should expect to see old and new forms of the URLs as this change gradually rolls out.
Q: What is the biggest difference between the old and the new?
A: The key difference between these two urls is that instead of “/search?” the URL contains a “/url?”. If you run your own analyses, be sure that you do not depend on the “/search?” portion of the URL to determine if a visit started with an organic search click. Google Analytics does not depend on the “/search?” string in the referrer, so users of Google Analytics will not notice a difference in their reports, but other analytics packages may need to adapt to this change in our referrer string to maintain accurate reports.
