Google SEO News and Discussion Forum

In other words, there's clearly some motive here *other* than improving the user experience.

if we can hope the browser makers patch their product to pull the referer info out of the url, can we also ask server-side product makers like Apache and the PHP team to do the same?

As far as I'm aware, URI fragments were always a bit of an "add-on" to the URI spec, and thus there's is no real standardisation about what to do with them.

The fragment identifier is not used in the scheme-specific processing of a URI; instead, the fragment identifier is separated from the rest of the URI prior to a dereference, and thus the identifying information within the fragment itself is dereferenced solely by the user agent, regardless of the URI scheme.

I guess the only solution is to log out and stay out until you Googlers get your priorities in order.

And then again, I have not seen Direct response from G at this point here, so may be it is a fluke...

How are webmasters supposed to load dynamic content based on user Intent now?

I expect this will break Brett's highlighting feature, which is a shame. That's just one of the implications beyond breaking all the competing analytics apps.

Many uses for referrer string data, and only some are related to SEO.

Google may have every right to further their own interests and provide "an improved search tool". However, with a near monopoly in the search game, I am not sure that they have the unilateral right to "break the Internet" - meaning implementing something that quite literally turns things upside down for such a broad section of users.

Logs and referrer stats have been an important part of web development since the beginning. They are not used only to create useless or irrelevant web pages.

In other words, there's clearly some motive here *other* than improving the user experience.

Yes, it has looked for quite some time like G wants to do far more than "organize" the world's information...

(For those who don't know, you should always expect a small amount of this sort of referer, as an 'I feel lucky' button landing will look like this!)

Mack.

The URLs of the search results themselves don't have an "#". They show the old style Google referer URLs (NOT regular URLs like [webmasterworld.com...] Won't this allow searches to be tracked, because the individual URLs have the old style links?

Mack.

Since I'm not getting any other functionality, there isn't any possible positive in this for webmasters, not for Google either since if a webmaster has no clue that [steamy red widgets] is a good search term they won't buy adwords for it.

Mack.

One thing for sure, this change will hurt new webmasters more than experienced ones who have years of legacy data. I certainly know what people in my niche search for. Someone new in the industry will not know that people search for [red steamy widgets] far more than [steamy red widgets], and they will have to use the exact match adwords tool to find that out... assuming Google won't also break the adwords tool too.

Google has fundamentally altered the net in any number of ways, virtually all self serving when one looks closely...

I guess if you're big enough you can do just about anything you want to.

I know people are also getting the AJAX version in the UK. redirects to normal SERPs when I try from my IP though.

[edited by: Receptional_Andy at 12:10 pm (utc) on Feb. 5, 2009]
[edit reason] No screenshots please, see ToS [/edit]

[edited by: Receptional_Andy at 12:18 pm (utc) on Feb. 5, 2009]

[edited by: SteveJohnston at 12:17 pm (utc) on Feb. 5, 2009]

The value of fp appears to be irrelevant as long as it's present. Google also adds an additional parameter (e.g. &cad=[a-z]) for the AJAX searches.