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Comment by th0ma5 | Hacker News Reader

the standard is the referrer being in the HTTP headers, not specifically that if the referrer is google, that it must include the search terms used in their search

we seem to be putting more reliance on these flimsy things... in the future will i create an outage because i @somebody instead of #something on twitter?

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In the case of web browsers, we don't even SEE the stuff that comes after the #

So it's not like putting "@someone" instead of "#someone" but rather like putting "" instead of "#someone"

See the difference+

sorry, maybe a bad example on my part, my point is that querystring parameters being passed should include the search terms used on that search engine is something of a rule of thumb more so than a standard... but i don't know that there are any standards built on top of the http referrer other than this is how google and many others operated, so these reporting companies wrote code that relied on that, rather than coding to a standard.

I can see your point, but if Google adds that capability to Google Analytics they will have a significant advantage over their competitors. So the question is not simply about following an unofficial standard.

How would they even do that if there's no query data in the referer? Set a cookie on google.com and then read it back from analytics.google.com is the only thing I can think of.

Not really no. If the web browser isn't sending the information, then take that up with your browser... it's the one that has the information and is dropping it.

Then again, I should point out that I'm not seeing this behavior, so this may be much ado about nothing.

Yeah but you can bet your ass Google knows it's breaking every browser out there. If they wanted to make a change this big, they should have contacted the 4 major browser vendors at least 1 year in advance to give them the opportunity to implement this. It's fucking bullshit.

Huh? They are neither breaking browsers nor are they doing anything beyond reportedly testing this change.

Do you honestly believe that people keep their browsers up to date? Do you know how old IE 6 is?

No, I don't believe that. Did I say that?

You seem to believe that a notification to browser makers a year ago somehow would have solved this.

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