Google Analytics’ blog just announced this week that Google’s classic search referral string will be changing format. They advise Webmasters who run their own server-side analytics packages to change their query string references from “/search?” to “/url?”.
In fact, if you’re a Webalizer user and you know how to configure Webalizer you should not have to change anything, as the correct query string reference to parse out is “q=”, which is not changing.
I have no idea of what the people at Google Analytics are thinking of — perhaps there are other packages out there which would look for “/search?” and they shall now have to be changed. But this announcement does make me wonder just exactly how well the Google Analytics team understands industry analytics techniques.
I’ve long noticed major discrepancies between Google Analytics data and my own server side search reference data. Google Analytics recognizes far fewer search engines and search engine referrals than server side analytics packages (I have used several through the years, not just Webalizer). I often have to look at site referrals in Google Analytics to see data for other search engines (but I cannot get the keyword data).
In any event, if you are using Webalizer and you have specified “q=” for Google search referral parsing, DO NOT CHANGE ANYTHING. Wait and see if Google’s new Javascript interface changes your server-side analytics reporting.
If it does, I doubt implementing “/url?” will fix the problem. You would probably have to install an upgrade for Webalizer (and who knows when it would be fixed?).
Written by Michael Martinez
