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This week, it was announced that Google was making changes to search referral URLs. Basically, where URLs looked like this before:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search

They will start looking more like this:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

You can read a bit more about that here. Web technologist Niall Kennedy suggested that this was probably a change being made to better track search actions and shield URL parameters from sites downstream.

Alex Chitu at the blog Google Operating System had a different and frankly, more interesting theory, which is that it is a solution for the lack of referral information in a future Ajax interface.

Matt Cutts recently explained in the following clip that Google was testing AJAX results on a small number of users to open up potentially faster searching capabilities. Listening to him discuss how this would affect analytics puts the URL changes a little bit more into perspective.

Chitu’s theory was confirmed when a Google spokesperson told CNET that this was the reasoning for the referral URL change. "These guys are working hard to make things milliseconds faster. They’re always experimenting," the spokesperson said.

In the above video, Cutts says the experiment is only available to less than 1% of Google users. Basically what it does is loads search results without loading the entire page each time a new search is performed. Milliseconds indeed.

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