Google Search Referrers Disappear In iOS 6

Doesn't it also say not to send refer data to different domains? I'm trying to find docs for that.

EDIT: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141641 Maybe I'm wrong but that seems to be what some browsers do/did.

On my desktop (with chrome) searching google via HTTPS I get search results that first redirect to a HTTP page on Google then does a client redirect to the search result. This produces referer information to the search result.

It seems this step is not being taken on iOS, it could be google who singling out iOS6 and not doing the redirect to the HTTP page.

It is a huge deal and has been since Google stopped passing referrers for signed-in users last October. That's because...

1) If it's a privacy thing, then Google is happy having a leak by giving these terms to advertisers

2) The data is not provided in a way that can be used by third party ad retargeting terms, giving Google a competitive advantage

3) Publishers can't use the data to better target with landing pages

4) Google Webmaster Central data only goes back for a short period of time, and if you haven't constantly been downloading your data, all your historic traffic information related to a term has gone poof.

This is a massively huge deal for attribution of organic search.

The queries you can download from webmaster tools are just 1 column of data....nothing to tie queries to conversions or any meaningful metric.

If it was everyone who was losing this data...I could understand the change but if you buy adwords ads, you still get the referral data even in https Google.

You can't have it all. The HTTP RFC is very clear that referrer data from HTTPS sites should not be sent to HTTP sites (in order to protect the content of the HTTPS site - remember: Even the URL is transmitted in an encrypted way, so it might contain sensitive data).

So by doing the Google searches over HTTPS, you make the life of pages and analytics vendors harder, but you are doing a huge favor to the end users because now their searches are private between them and Google. Nobody else on the way can sniff them. No government and no neighbor/coworker.

Of course, once the user clicked and found your site, the URL the user initially used isn't that confidential any more, so in theory, passing the referrer wouldn't be a problem in this case, but that's not what the standard says and it's not what browsers are doing.

If you want to see this changed, talk to the IETF or the W3C to have the standard changed such that, for example, google could add some rel= attribute to tell the browser that sending a referrer is OK.

Or just serve your page over SSL, further helping the end-user - and it's all about them in the first place - isn't it?

I'm guessing that the deliberate skip the HTTP intermediate page to reduce latency on mobile clients. If you are on something like GPRS or Edge, that extra hop could add a lot of latency.

It's a trade-off between ensuring a good user experience (fast page loads) and a good website owner experience (full referer data).

FWIW, I find the HTTP intermediate step a tad annoying (it makes copy-and-pasting a result from Google a bit more awkward), but I can see why it's there.

I think you missed the point of the above demonstration a bit. It was meant to demonstration that iOS6 is acting completely normal. No referer is sent for https, and that is expected behavior. Google even went so far as to send out emails, blog posts to the analytics and the webmaster tools blogs, and G+ posts about it a while back so GA users would not be surprised as there referrer data decreased. For those missing refers we now have to use the Webmaster Tools and try to piece the data together a bit.

agree, this is something new. here's how google search on desktop acted the last time i checked:

from http://google.com --> redirects to a url that sends "google.com..." referrer with search terms

from https://google.com --> redirects to a url that sends "google.com..." referrer with search term stripped

from https://encrypted.google.com --> sends blank referrer

Actually, scratch that. You shouldn't be getting a referrer at all. We'll check further, but you should check with Google searches.

I agree with the logic for sure - My point is more about using the active verb "Removes", as if iOS 6 gets really close to passing the referer header, but removes it at the last second.

Maybe something like "omits" or "doesn't pass" would have been more true to the story - but I understand a writer needing to have a catchy title.

Default search site changed to be SSL. Are we really complaining that's a bad thing?

Think of the children too.

Personally I couldn't care less if some people lose jobs.

SEO in general is all about gaming the algorithms of search engines to gain an unfair advantage. A search engine that needs SEO to get to the front page is a broken search engine. And because Google has the incentive and the resources to constantly improve it, an industry built around the deficiencies of a search engine is doomed for extinction from the start.

Of course, SEO is not the only reason for why some companies need analytics. But for all the other reasons, they should do what good businesses have always done and actually talk to their customers or potential customers, instead of looking in the records of their referrers, which often contains the deepest desires of people without them realizing that the data in question will be released.

    if you don't want to be track there is one very 
    simple solution turn off your computer.

These kind of statements kind of make my blood boil and I'm trying really hard to contain my anger.

As to your statement, you're saying it like it's an option to turn off the computer. Well, that's not an option anymore for many people, and it's increasingly clear that we're going to depend on computers connected to the Internet for everything, like for doing our shopping, for paying our bills, for communicating with others and for being able to do our jobs.

It's enough to say that privacy is a fundamental right that people should always keep fighting for and for which eternal vigilance is required. And if there ever was a time in history when people truly had privacy, that was only because some people fought for it.

Totalitarian states never needed high-tech, like interconnected computers or street video cameras with face recognition and GPS chips implants and all that crap, all they needed was for people to turn on each other, so the Internet is not even a prerequisite, but human stupidity and shortsightedness is.