It seems Google is testing a new AJAX powered search on US Google searches. So what?
Well it seems a standard Google search returns the url http://www.google.com/search?q=cloudave when searching for CloudAve. The new search returns http://www.google.com/#q=cloudave. The difference being that standard referral tracking and analytics services don’t see anything after the “#”.
The search community has gone ballistic on this one (not surprisingly fuelled by competitors to Google’s own analytics product).
Uncharacteristically Google has replied to the uproar saying;
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.
Commenters in blog land seem evenly split between those who consider Google’s move anti-competitive and downright nasty, to more moderate souls who contend that; a) this is Google doing what it has every right to do, protecting it’s competitive advantage and b)it’s a test goddamit – just relax.
Given that this is just a limited test I tend to fall into the latter, more moderate camp. However if the test gets rolled out further, or indeed becomes a default set-up, there’ll be some lousy information in a lot of people’s analytics reports. Unfortunately a simple change to analytics solutions will not get over this one – it’ll require some browser code rewrite apparently.
Another storm in a teacup?
