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Comment by ldjb | Hacker News Reader

Firefox still sends the origin (the domain name and subdomain) of the referring page, so you can still see the website the user is coming from.

Google has had a dereferral process in place for many years anyway, which prevents you from seeing the specific search engine results page the user is coming from. So this really doesn't change anything for those websites such as Google that already had these security features in place.

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> Google has had a dereferral process in place for many years anyway, which prevents you from seeing the specific search engine results page the user is coming from.

Is this really a security feature though? Or is it Google keeping the important information for themselves?

It's certainly has nothing to do with security. It's Google's way to force you to use Google Analytics if you want to track said informarion.

Google Analytics does not give you additional keyword information.

If you want keyword information from Google search results, the best way to get it is actually buying ads for those keywords. And in fact some marketers allocate ad budget to keywords they already rank for, specifically for that purpose.

But to the grandparent's point, GA used to give you a ton more organic info at the keyword level. It is part of what drove the seo industry. The only way to get an abstract view of that keyword volume now, including on your brand terms, is to buy ads and run the organic reports.

Also, it prevents you from exfiltrating Google's ML model for search and build up your own.

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