Just wow. I'm really starting to anti-trust Google.
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?
Could this be a subtle move to require people use google Analytics instead of their own log file analysis?
The redirect script has been tehre for as long as I remember. It's probably tied in with Google Analytics.
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.
I know they're huge, but it's still a free product/service, they shouldn't have to retard their progress to avoid breaking other products. If they decided to stop supporting IE (while potentially bad business) I'd support their right to do so.
What exactly do they owe you?
But it is my trust and they can still lose it. The fact is that I believe this to be shady, and for a company whose motto is "Don't be evil", they raise the standard for trusting them. A standard which I don't believe they are meeting.
Yes it's a side effect, but it's ridiculous to say that was the intent of the change.
"I don't know how they're gonna do it, but...but...they're bad...'cause they're gonna hurt competition, so they'll find some way of not hurting themselves, they have to!"
Besides, the hashmark is a standard of its own when it comes to Ajax applications. Google isn't doing anything suspiciously new with that.