Is Google Being “Evil”? Plans to Annihilate their Analytics Competition with Ajax?

It appears Google is testing ajax search for Google Search on the US version of the site, great right? No. If this goes ahead, firefox extensions, various tools and virtually every website analytics tool would break. Why?

Let us explain…

When you search in Google normally you’ll notice the URL’s after you search look something like this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=test – when you search for “test”

well, in Google US, which for most people, has the ajax feature enabled …the URL turns into this:

http://www.google.com/#q=test – with a “#”

See, web browsers won’t send anything after the ‘#’ and therefore applications such as analytics tools can’t receive information as to what people are searching for leaving competitors to Google Analytics, dead. 

Clicky, one of Google Analytics competitiors is right to be concerned. As Wayne Smallman, of Blah Blah Technology! blog points out this a “game changer and not in a good way”. 

Read More: 

Smackdown, ClickyBlog, 

Thanks to:

Blah Blah Technology

UPDATE: A Google spokesperson shared this statement with the people at SearchEngineLand (thanks for the tip Matt!):

“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.”