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Comment by axod | Hacker News Reader

They don't owe you that information, sure it's nice I guess...

In any event, the only way I can think to do this with an ajax search is to pass every outgoing link click through a redirection script, so that the referrer is rewritten to something useful.

However, whilst improving things for webmasters, that would seriously negate the point of using ajax, and be a pain for end users.

Google are serving their end users. I don't think trust comes into it TBH.

What would you rather google do? not progress and use ajax search, or use a redirection and make a worse experience for end users?

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Unless I'm way off, Google is already doing a redirection script on all outbound clicks. The endpoint url shows up in the footer of the browser on hover, but if you right-click and copy the link location, you get something like:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&...

Yep, that's right.

Could this be a subtle move to require people use google Analytics instead of their own log file analysis?

That doesn't affect the referrer though. The referrer is still the link where the click came fromo, which woulld still be e.g. google.com/search?q=whatever

The redirect script has been tehre for as long as I remember. It's probably tied in with Google Analytics.

The author says he is seeing referers of just "google.com/" in his logs. If they were redirected wouldn't he be seeing these /url pages instead?

Here's a crazy hack they could do to use ajax queries while preserving the current referer url:

Whenever the ajax search is performed an invisible iframe is loaded at: http://google.com/search?q=search+term&donothing=true.

The donothing=true tells Google's webserver to perform no actual query and return a blank page. This should happen extremely quickly. (It could be performed after the ajax results have been fully loaded as to not affect response time)

Then when a user clicks a search result, Google does a javascript redirect from the iframe (use javascript to add a new <script> tag with a window.top.location= in it) and you get a referer just like you would before... with a negligible performance hit.

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