In this Internet era, privacy has become a concern for many users. I often say that you will leave your digital footprint behind when you traverse through the Internet. Recently this digital footprint has been exploited everywhere from marketing agencies for behavioral targeting, to law enforcement agencies for convicting criminals. Your searches provide a unique glimpse into your recent intentions as well as your personality, and thus search privacy is becoming a hot topic these days.
Search engine companies are now competing in a new way — they are racing to protect their users’ personal information. Microsoft, Yahoo and Google have gone public with their privacy policies to win the trust of their users. On May 21, Google rolled out a secure search at httpS://www.google.com which helps protect your search terms and your search results pages from being intercepted by a third party. Notice the “SSL” on Google’s secure search page:
Google Secure Search Home Page
When you’re using Google secure search, Google forms an encrypted connection between your browser and Google’s server by using Secure Socket Layer (SSL). SSL is very commonly used by e-commerce and online banking websites to encrypt information that travels between your computer and their service. Here are a few things you should know when you search using this new secure search service from Google:
- You won’t see links to offerings like Image Search and Maps.
- Your browsing experience might be slightly slower than your regular Google search experience.
- Clicking on any of the search results could take you out of SSL mode.
Secure Search and Web Analytics
The secure search method as described above presents a unique challenge to the web analytics industry. When people click on an external link from the search results generated via SSL sessions, the referrer information will not be passed to any web analytics tools. Thus, secure search will not allow web analytics tools including Google Analytics to track organic traffic coming from any secure search engine. In Google Analytics all the visits coming from a secure search service will be considered as direct visits instead of organic visits.
If secure search becomes the de facto standard, it will definitely have an impact on web analytics and web analytics software. If you have thoughts as to how to resolve the challenge secure search presents, please share them via comments on this blog.
[...] released two new privacy related features for the Google Analytics service. You can read more about Google secure search in my previous article; for now let’s review some new privacy features in Google [...]