Google SSL, & Tigers & Bears. Oh My!

I stumbled upon this today. I literally left the “S” in there from a previous secure website visit.

https://www.google.com/

It’s a secure way to search Google. Now, granted, I’m not always early picking up the latest goings on from web companies (I’m a little busy), but from the look of it, this is quite new.

“Available as a beta service, the new ‘https’ Google search site sets up an encrypted tunnel between the user’s browser and Google as a way of making it impossible for search results to be intercepted by third parties such as ISPs.” An article at Network World – Click here >>

This is good stuff. Or is it?

“If you click on a link to some non-SSL page…then when you arrive at that page you will arrive with your referrer stripped,” Scroogle founder Daniel Brandt said. “The webmaster on that site won’t know that you came from Google, and won’t know what search terms you used to get there. He won’t even know if you used a search engine (you could have just keyed in the URL in your address bar, which would also cause no referrer).”

As head of a company that makes money getting Google to like your website, I may be a bit concerned. Some say this will create problems for companies who want to use content to rank higher on organic results pages. As a company that tracks which web terms your prospects use to search, Ion Leap uses Google data to determine which search terms are getting the most demand. So with SSL encryption of your search, are we in trouble?

Nah

I don’t believe honest marketers will ever be in serious trouble on the Internet. There will always have to be ways to find good information. Way back, in pre-history, I said that if content writing is no longer a way to help companies get noticed on the Internet, then Ion Leap will morph into the kind of company that still helps businesses get attention. We’re Internet marketers. We will adapt.

At the Clicky blog, they posted this apocalyptic rant announcing the death of analytics – “Say goodbye to search analytics…Google just announced their new secure search beta…the search term is not passed through the referrer, and hence no analytics tool (not even a good old log analyzer) will have any idea of what a visitor searched for to reach your site.” Clicky also hinted that this may be a reaction to Google’s recent difficulties with restrictive governments like China.

Maybe I’m not so negative about this new development because Ion Leap does more than just content for search optimization. Or maybe it’s because I have never-ending admiration for Google’s ability to understand what the Internet, and the public who use it, needs.

If it sucks, it won’t stick

Google isn’t out to make our lives difficult. After all, who do they receive their revenue from? Folks who care about their website traffic, that’s who. If they make that person’s job difficult or impossible (as this may do) then they’ll be hurting themselves beyond belief.

Why?

Is this the sign of a company that’s finally getting too big and distant from it’s customers?

Maybe.

I sure hope not.