Google is currently testing search results delivered via “Ajax” from google.com itself. Big deal? Yes. This change breaks search/keyword tracking for every single analytics app in existence. Normally when do you a search on Google or any other search engine, the search term used become part of the URL. For example:http://www.google.com/search?q=test

When someone clicks a search result on that page, that URL above is sent as the “referrer” to the target site. An analytics app running on the target site can parse the referrer string and extract the word “test”, and store that as a search that occured for that site. This is obviously very useful. I would say that knowing what searches are driving traffic to your site is probably the #1 reason to use an analytics service in the first place.

Well here’s what the NEW referrers look like:http://www.google.com/#q=test

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.

This means organic searches from Google will now show up as just “http://www.google.com/”, with no search parameters. In other words, no analytics app can track these searches anymore. I started noticing lots of hits from just “http://www.google.com/” recently in our own search logs.

I thought maybe it was just a bug with Clicky. But then one of our users contacted me about this article, and my jaw about broke from hitting the floor so hard.I’m not sure if this is just being bucket tested, or if it’s live for everyone, but it’s live for me when I go to google.com. I do hope this is just in testing phase still, but the fact that Google is even considering doing this, with blatant disregard for the fact that they will be breaking every single analytics, stats, and log analyzer product on the planet, is just amazing.So what can we do about it? If you run a blog, write about this. Submit this story or your own story to large tech blogs like TechCrunch, CenterNetworks, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOm, etc – no large site has written about this yet, and one of them needs to.

Post in Google’s Web Search forums (there’s no way to directly contact them about web search unfortunately). Do anything you can to spread the word and let Google know that this is completely unacceptable.Of course,

I’d be willing to bet that somehow, Google Analytics will still be able to get the search terms. I have no way of verifying this as I don’t use GA, but Google is not dumb and there’s no way they’d break this for their own app too.

I can see it now: “Oh, sorry, we broke Clicky? No worries guys! Come use Google Analytics, and everything will be fine! Oh, we completely destroyed all our competitors in the process?

Whoops!” – Uncle Google

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