In the Name of Security, did Google act Selfish?

Google, one of the biggest and most popular search engines silently made a change to its search and announced that its search has become 100% secure. Google says, previously only the signed in user search was secure (which was ~10% of the organic traffic), but now secure search has been made global.

Before I tell the pros and cons of secure search we will 1^st see what does google mean by secure search? 

Here is the google search engine. 

Previously when you typed google.com it would lead you to http://www.google.co.in, but now it takes you to https://www.google.co.in. You see that "https"? ‘s’ stands for secure. 

This ‘s’ means, whatever you type in your google search bar is very secure and will not be passed on to anyone else i.e. no one will come to know what you searched for. Read What is organic data? to see how your search keywords are passed on to websites you visit. 

So, feeling happy and safe? Well, enjoy your privacy, but there are bigger implications to this. 

Remember the Search Engine Optimizers, who make your web experience better every day, they are currently on the verge of losing their jobs. 

 

Let’s see what difference secure search made to the world of web analytics.

So, here I am searching for “flipkart android phones” on google.com, and I choose to visit one of the organic (non paid) search results.  

Let’s see on firebug what data was passed on to flipkart. Aswe already, know utmctr variable (of google analytics) captures the search keyword which visitors typed in search engine. 

OMG, where is the search term that I typed? Instead there is this silly “not%20provided” as the value for utmctr variable. My keyword is lost!!! It will not go to flipkart.com web logs and will not get reported in the google analytics reports generated by flipkart!!! BooHoo...!!!

I have repeated the same steps on bing.com, which does not have secure search.

See, the utmctr captures keywords “flipkart%20android%20phones” which I typed on bing.com. Now this will be collected in  weblogs and will be available in reports of flipkart.com. Yay!!!

Coming to the Paid (non-organic) search.  Keywords for Paid search still flow in to the reports i.e. if you type some keywords and click on the paid ad’s (the top results which are colored ), keyword data gets captured and is also made available to the website you visit. But do you know, whenever you click on paid ad’s the company whose website you visit has to pay google? And this is no petty amount; there is a lot of bidding which happens for the paid ad’s. 

So do you think Google acted Selfish? Probably yes if look from the perspective of an analyst, but No when look from the eyes of a user who is tensed about his security. 

People around the world use various search engines. Few months back, yahoo got the highest number of unique visitors in US than google.com. Still, google.com is one of the major search engines which contributes a lot of organic traffic. Since the launch of 100% secure search by google, traffic with the keyword “not provided” has increased to ~45% for any website. Google’s its own analytics tool also does not get access to the organic search keywords.  

Now with this “Not Provided” data, search engine optimizers are in a fix. Keyword information from other search engines still flows into the reports and can be used to take decision, but having a better quality data always helps in taking better decisions. Big People say, that its time analysts should move on from the search keyword analysis and find others ways of increasing their web traffic and conversions. Probably, losing keyword data is a boon in disguise and Google is paving way for analysts to come up with some good innovations in the world of web analytics.