Say goodbye to search analytics

http://getclicky.com/blog/216/say-goodbye-to-search-analytics

by mootymoots • 16 years ago

105 61 16 years ago

barredo3• 16 years ago

tl;dr: web analytics company starts claiming bullshit about privacy in search engines

Also, in other news: some people start claiming bullshit about issues than are better for other people but bad for them.

ps. I did upvote this post in HN just for the sake of discussion and comments, but I don't like the tone of the original poster with his 'HN hipsters' and 'BS' all around.

subbu2• 16 years ago

IMHO his argument seems valid. My site's Google Analytics tells me what were the search terms and which search engine sent me the traffic. Why not share that with the web masters if that can help them create better content or tweak their SEO?

barredo3• 16 years ago

I did not say it wasn't valid I said i didn't like the tone. Compare the post with something like:

"Look, search analytics are important to the webmasters because X, Y & Z. If search engines start to implement this option we could do A, B & C, but that will make the site owner job more difficult because knowing where your visitors come its huge and too important."

rodion_89• 16 years ago

im not fully convinced that the argument is valid. he's claiming that our privacy is unaffected but his business is. so that really makes me ask, what right does he have to our actions that do not take place on his site? it leads us to his site, but not on his site. it seems like he is simplifying the situation to make it seem like there is no benefit to the user. if it was optional to share that information with the webmaster, thats fine because its data about us and we can do what we want with it. funny thing is, it is optional.

dedward2• 16 years ago

Us users don't want google to direct us to the site with the best SEO guys on any given topic - we want them to direct us to the sites that are most likely to contain the data we are searching for.

Google's job, to stay on top of the search engine market, is to keep delivering good results to those doing searches - that's how they keep their audience, and keep selling ads.

jsz0• 16 years ago

A Facebook advertiser could make the same argument about having access to more user data. Most people probably think their searches are private already.

mootymoots2• 16 years ago

Let's not forget we, the webmasters, create the content for Google to serve as search results...

The least they can do is help us out!

dirkstoop• 16 years ago

Because sending us 80% of our traffic is not enough help?

schammy2• 16 years ago

I meant no offense. I'm an HN hipster myself. I can see how it could be offensive, so I'll remove it. I really didn't mean anything by it though. I also wasn't expecting a HN post but within 30 minutes of hitting 'publish' it was the #1 story on HN, so... yeah.

gyardley• 16 years ago

Yes, this is a pain in the butt for webmasters, and yes, if Google arranged for only Google Analytics to display these search terms, it'd be an anticompetitive abuse of market power. But any webmaster's power ends at the limits of their site.

Really don't like people using encrypted search and not passing along search terms? Don't serve them the content they were looking for - explain the situation to them instead. Or pursue a milder approach where the content is displayed alongside a suggestion that they use an unencrypted search engine. That's about all the recourse you've legitimately got.

barredo3• 16 years ago

> But any webmaster's power ends at the limits of their site.

I guess that's it. User's rights are above webmaster's right. If you don't like them you can start disallowing search engines in your robots.txt or blocking users by referrer.

paraschopra• 16 years ago

But search engines shouldn't block referrer by default. Majority of users don't care about telling web masters what they were searching for. So search engines should only let users who do care about privacy to block referrer, block it by default is a poor choice (unless you are DDG and privacy is your differentiator)

javery2• 16 years ago

If Google Adsense still has access to this data to serve more relevant ads on the destination site and other ad providers don't then it is very anti-competitive.

btmorex2• 16 years ago

Umm... Adsense doesn't need a referrer and it definitely doesn't need search terms. Adsense crawls every page that it serves ads for and that's going to be better context then any analytics packages would offer.

javery2• 16 years ago

What someone searched for is very valuable when it comes to context, you can crawl and index a page to see its about iPod Accessories - but you can look at the referral and see the person searched for iPod Touch Case and make the ads that much better.

stingraycharles2• 16 years ago

Adsense uses behavioral targeting, of which a part is based on the search queries you enter into Google (as in, when you're searching for "christmas toys" on Google, for a certain amount of time you become a hot target for relevant ads in Adsense).

Other ad providers were able to mimic this by analyzing the referrer urls from which people were being redirected. This is not possible anymore. If Adsense doesn't disable this functionality, then Google is indeed acting anticompetitive.

tptacek5• 16 years ago

It's anticompetitive to allow people to use SSL to talk to your service? Google doesn't control the Referer header, your browser does.

ErrantX3• 16 years ago

So,basically, this threatens his business so he rants about it.

Fair enough be concerned for your business - but attacking DDG and Google for it is unlikely to win favours :P

schammy2• 16 years ago

That's certainly part of the reason, but I also have the POV of someone who runs many web sites, and I know how annoying it would be to lose search analytics. This is for the greater good of anyone who owns a site. Knowing what searches people are doing to get to your site is extremely important.

ErrantX3• 16 years ago

Unfortunately "what users want" always comes first.

And at the moment privacy is the buzzword.

_delirium• 16 years ago

You can get some version of analytics directly from Google via Webmaster Tools. It's a bit more aggregated and anonymized, though.

mootymoots2• 16 years ago

I wonder if Google Analytics still manages to store the search data?

chaosmachine• 16 years ago

Unlikely, unless they completely rewrote how it works.

gmurphy• 16 years ago

Technical reason: Referers aren't sent when transitioning from an SSL page to a non-SSL page - to get the referer sent along, there would need to be an intermediate HTTP step and redirect, which would be slower, and would defeat the point of secure search.

Here is the bug in Chromium where this was added: http://crbug.com/29920

PonyGumbo• 16 years ago

Thank you. This is what I came here to say.

nzmsv• 16 years ago

Also, converting the entire site to https will get the referer back. At least with Firefox: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.http.sendSecureXSiteReferr...

nostrademons• 16 years ago

Proof that no matter what you do, some people will be unhappy about it.

vladimir4• 16 years ago

True. But I think in this situation no one except Google will be happy (and I doubt they'll be happy too). Web analytics helps webmasters make their sites more attractive for end users. I use Google Analytics on most of my sites, but I don't like the way how Google tries to "encourage" others to do it.

tptacek5• 16 years ago

Wait, what? You think Google should deny users SSL so that analytics can work better? That can't be what you're implying, can it?

doron• 16 years ago

except Google and errrm maybe users? count me as happy.

vladimir4• 16 years ago

To be honest, I don't understand how using HTTPS in Google search will help users to browse web more securely. I am not going to use this feature. The bad thing is that lots of non-technical users who care about security and privacy will use it, and they'll get an illusion that their web surfing has become more secure.

briansmith2• 16 years ago

It's not an illusion. Your ISP can't see what you're searching for. The coffee shop wifi administrator can't see what you're searching for. Your boss can't find out what you're searching for from your mobile phone over your company's wifi network. The owners of the websites in the SERPs can't see what you searched for, and they can't give that information to anybody else (e.g. Facebook Connect).

(Well, they can all do traffic analysis. But, for Google searches, traffic analysis is too much work for almost any of them to do and the results would be so inconclusive that it's practically useless.)

vladimir4• 16 years ago

I don't think ISP cannot see what I'm searching for if Google allows me to use HTTPS. When we use HTTPS, data is encrypted. But URLs I'm querying are still open for anyone. If someone knows that I queried, for example, http://www.google.co.uz/?q=google, it's pretty easy to understand what I've been searching for.

pierrefar2• 16 years ago

Two points of relevance:

1. Say I walk into a shop and they can't help me, so they suggest that I go another shop down the road. When I go into the second shop, I always tell them that the first sent me. It's not an invasion of privacy at all and I think it's common courtesy.

So I don't understand why a search engine referral to a website is any different.

What I do worry about is what the target website does in terms of behavioral tracking, which is a bit creepy. Merely transferring referral info and letting websites use that in aggregate so they can understand their traffic better is something is not that creepy.

2. Google Webmaster Tools recently started showing keyword ranking and traffic data. If you study the data they share in WMT vs Google Analytics, a few patterns emerge. In a way, they are taking away the data Analytics shows and then give it back in WM Tools. This is one area to keep an eye on.

ErrantX3• 16 years ago

I'd say point #1 isn't 100% the same. In your analogy search engine referrals might be akin to the shop you just left putting a sticker with their name on you.

pierrefar2• 16 years ago

Yes, fair point, but other scenarios are deemed acceptable too: referring shop giving me their business card to give to the destination shop, or them calling ahead "to check" if what I wanted is in stock, or telling me to say "Joe from Shop X sent you" and they'll take care of me.

Also, two companies can partner and Company 1 can give a special discount to its customers to buy from Company 2, using a special promotion code.

My point still stands I think: there are many kinds of referral tracking we deem acceptable in the offline world.

rsingel• 16 years ago

So giving people the option to hide their searches from tyrannical regimes, snooping schools and overbearing corporate IT firms, let alone a kid with a copy of wireshark at a local café is evil? Grow up. It's in beta and will unlikely ever become the default due to the extra latency and server load. Ignore all that and seek for attention anyhow.

nitrogen• 16 years ago

SSL won't hide anything from anyone who really wants to see it, as they can set up an SSL proxy using a certificate that is trusted by your browser. The address bar will turn blue, and the certificate info will say something like, "issued to www.gmail.com, issued by [IT-obsessed corporation name here]".

ugh• 16 years ago

What a pathetic overreaction. Google’s words: “[…] we’re gradually rolling out a new choice to search more securely […]”. Gradually. Choice. It’s beta. There is no indication that this will ever be the default.

It’s pretty clear to me that Google sees this as a feature for the tiny minority of people who care about such things.

dedward2• 16 years ago

Sour grapes.....

If what google wanted was to stop letting search terms show up in weblogs of sites they linked to, they could have done it plenty of other ways, cheaper and easier than rolling out SSL globally.... and they were never obligated to provide this to us in the first place.

Say goodbye to search analytics

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