Note: If you are looking information for French courses you are in the wrong place. This post is actually about Google’s new SSL encryption for search…
It’s definitely the year 1995! The Big 3 are fighting about whose browser is better, if flash should be supported or not and the “look and feel” is not about desktops anymore but is still in the news everyday…
Nokia is suing Apple for patent infringement, Apple is replying back in style by suing Nokia and Steve Jobs spends hours writing letters explaining why Apple does what it does…[ouch, blue screen of death just hit me! Rebooting and I’ll be back…]
Google on the other hand has to be the “Microsoft” of this new sequel! They are the ones the monopolise almost every computer activity, they buy every company that knows what the difference between is between HTML and XHTML and have a business plan in hand and make sure that every decision they make affects billions! I’ve read somewhere that if a decision has a n impact for less than 100 million user they don’t even bother posting it in their official blog!
Staying faithful in this principle they decided yesterday (25 May 1995 that is!) to post some news about their SSL encryption feature in search (public Beta). It will anyway affect billions of users! Being really concerned about security and user experience they decided that posting information via an insecure and unencrypted connections is not safe anymore… Well done I say, security is a serious concern so lets move on… I’m going out tonight to watch “Braveheart”, Mel Gibson’s new movie. Damn it, I say it’s not 1995! So I stayed in and started reading more about this new SLL thing…
Is this the end of Web Analytics?
I was not surprised when I read the first few blogposts, announcing “The end of Web Analytics” or other one talking about “evil Google”. Well, they are definitely no the good guys (they are the new Microsoft anyway!) but I started thinking what this new feature can bring… Is it really bad?
I picked up Comer’s bible, Computer Networks and Internets (yes, internets!) and started looking into SSL and HTTP_REFERER (intentionally misspelled, since in the original draft the Unix spellchecker could not recognise the error) and investigate the claim made in one of these posts: “If you click on a link to some non-SSL page...then when you arrive at that page you will arrive with your referrer stripped”.
Of course you don’t need a book for that it’s obvious. How about though when your landing page is also SSL encrypted… Nowhere in the book, I found anything about clicking from and SSL page to another SSL page. Does it strip the HTTP_REFERER or not? So I did the obvious, I tested… The test was far from scientific but was very simple and was set up to test exactly this, connecting from the encrypted search results page to another encrypted page (used Google Analytics to track results).
Using Google's new SSL Encrypted Search
Well, I was happily surprised to see that all the information that was supposed to be stripped was there; search query, location, visitor details etc… Great I said! This “SSL thing” doesn’t seem to be that bad… So if everything works fine what’s the catch? There must be something else, don’t forget we’re in 1995, things have to be different than they look… And then of course I thought of Microsoft, the Google of 1995!
What Microsoft managed to do for decades was to increase the need for faster computers in an exponential rate! No matter, how faster the new version of Windows is you always need more RAM and more processing power! But hold on a minute… Speed? Faster? New? Jackpot!
What the new SSL search feature can bring…
If my tests were correct (will be testing again and again for the next few weeks) it means that all you need to “save web analytics from a certain death” is an SSL encrypted hosting. Could it be so simple? I don’t know yet, still looking into this… While looking for more information I can’t stop thinking that it’s 1995 again… Google is doing exactly what Microsoft has been doing for decades; increasing the need for “power”…” Our hope is that more websites and services will add support for SSL to help create a better and more consistent experience for you”, reads their post.
SSL is nothing new or exotic of course, it just tends to be a bit pricey (signed certificates). For small companies this can be a serious problem when hosting budgets are limited. For big companies, the cost might be irrelevant but migrating everything to a dedicated server can be a painful task (SSL requires a dedicated server). NSI (name server identification) is a great solution that allows for multiple domains to be hosted under the same server and apply a signed certificate that resolves each on of them. Then of course your SEO can be affected, rankings will be all over the place and your Marketing Director will be having a nervous breakdown…
Although this is a great opportunity for hosting companies to up-sell to their clients, I can’t stop thinking about the rationale behind Google’s decision to move to an encrypted environment. Is it about security? Is it about “helping” hosting companies boosting their revenues? Or are they just leading the race? They are on their own out there anyway…
What Google says about their new SSL search feature...
Google has not yet officially clarified how they handle referrers in Google Analytics and other web analytics tools but they are planning to follow up on this issue very soon.
It is not Google that is blocking the HTTP_REFERER but rather the browsers as a default setting when connecting from https:// to http://, therefore we have to wait and see if a workaround is coming anytime soon.
