Google’s recent announcement of it’s, typically beta for now, encrypted search facility could have some undesirable implications for web site owners.

Initially available as an option to the normal un-encrypted search, you can opt in by simply replacing http://www.google com with https://www.google.com. Note the additional ‘s’. By doing this your web browser does not pass on any referral data to an un-encrypted web site.

The webmaster of that site will not know you came from Google, or any of the search terms used to find his site. He won’t even know if you came from a search engine or just typed the site url into your browser address bar.

This does not play nice with web analytics used by webmasters to fine tune site text and keywords to improve visibility in search engine results. Including Google’s own web analytics, used by the majority of webmasters to keep an eye on who finds their site and how. Without this information webmasters will have little idea what people were searching for to get to their site. A reasonable guess can be made from the landing page, but that is all.

Google of course will still have access to the search terms, and it’s not entirely clear how this protects the privacy of the web user.

All of this just makes the webmasters job that little bit more difficult.
It’s hoped Google do not make encrypted search the default option on the worlds most used search engine.