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Google Testing AJAX on Search Results Pages

Wednesday, 4 February 2009 @ 17:35, by Bill Mungovan

Google has launched a test on a small percentage of its users to try and find better ways to serve their search results. This test involves the use of AJAX which in some cases prevents analytics packages from picking up the Google referrer data. Although this test only impacts a small percentage of Google’s traffic it impacts all analytics packages on the market, including Google Analytics and including all SEO ranking tools.

This will NOT impact Omniture SearchCenter clients. SearchCenter advertisers will continue to see proper conversion tracking and will see no change in SearchCenter performance, reporting or functionality. All automated bid rules will continue to function properly.
Here’s the official response from Google:

“We’re continually testing new interfaces and features to enhance the user experience. We are currently experimenting with a javascript enhanced result page because we believe that it may ultimately provide a faster experience for our users. At this time only a small percentage of users will see this experiment. It is not our intention to disrupt referrer tracking, and we are continuing to iterate on this project. For more information on the experiments that we run on Google search, please see: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/this-is-test-this-is-only-test.html.”

We are in discussions with Google to get a better understanding of exactly what this means for Omniture SiteCatalyst users. We’ve got a very strong relationship with Google, as do many other big SEM vendors and analytics companies, and we don’t believe Google will intentionally jeopardize these relationships by implementing a change without a clear plan and without giving ample notice to their partners.

We will continue to keep you informed as we learn how these limited tests impact our customers.

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  1. Sean2009/2/5 @ 11:04 am

    I hope Omniture does the right thing and tries to convince Google that his information should be freely available to ALL analytics services. It would be a shame to see a large company flex its muscle with another large company to weed out all the small guys like us.
  2. googlemythkiller.com » Blog Archive » Google Tools About To Stop Working…2009/2/5 @ 11:35 am

    [...] Trends Blog : Google Testing Ajax, What’s that mean to me? Omniture: Google Testing Ajax In Web Results Search Engine Land: Google AJAX Search Results = Death To Search Term Tracking? Search Engine [...]
  3. David2009/2/8 @ 9:48 am

    i think this is more of a worry for software companies that arent using the right methods to get access to the data, im sure that they will supply an api key to web analytics companies to get around the update.
  4. Scott2009/2/27 @ 9:39 am

    Hi… I may have run into this google search results. I used firefox to search for a local bar and boom, I get this brand new results page:

    http://maps.google.com/maps?q=-&sll=45540794,-122675448&latlng=45540794,-122675448,8097661580814745576&dtab=0&ei=69-nSbW2E4SKiAP
    http://poprl.com/LVx (shortened)

    Screengrab here:
    http://screencast.com/t/xxuKRprl

    It has “&dtab” in the search results. Is this what you’re talking about? I’ve not been able to recreate this results page for any other search. I don’t know how it went from the google search bar within my browser (top right) immediately to what appears to be a Google Maps page instead of normal google. Thoughts?