Google's SSL Search Trims Referer

As Google revealed it's new ssl based search engine it was tough time for the webmasters to track what led the users to their site, what keywords they used, etc.... This is because the new google ssl search is known to strip most of the referer information. Unknown which search keywords led the users to their site the webanalytics will fail to prove useful. More on that here.

Below is the output from both http://www.google.com and https://www.google.com

HTTP Google

GET /url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=6&ved=0CC4QFjAF&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.eltalearning.com%2Fgoogle-referrer-string-search-rankings-data%2F2009%2F04%2F15%2F&ei=H237S_XCJ8_CrAegwcmyAg&usg=AFQjCNGPiCxtyds5NVuOwXMQ0_0Yyv0q9A&sig2=onn5bNic7xg-UUMENOG1vg HTTP/1.1
Host: www.google.co.in
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 115
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://www.google.co.in/search?q=google+referrer+string&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a


As you can see the 'q' parameter in the url (referred by Referer field) gives you the search string and other information as well. But the case is not same when you use the ssl search

HTTPS Google

GET /url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&ved=0CDEQFjAG&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.eltalearning.com%2Fgoogle-referrer-string-search-rankings-data%2F2009%2F04%2F15%2F&rct=j&q=google+referrer+string&ei=kG_7S42nNoWtrAeUzNGaCg&usg=AFQjCNGPiCxtyds5NVuOwXMQ0_0Yyv0q9A&sig2=6Yo5QsxF6vqs3cIL7iZwmw HTTP/1.1
Host: www.google.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 115
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: https://www.google.com/

You can clearly make out that when ssl search is used the Referer field's data has been trimmed, leaving with no information. Even if it provides privacy (does it?) on one angle, it obviously is a headache for most of the webanalytics providers out there!