Are Google SERPs moving to Ajax?

Here’s a question from Owen in London. Owen in London asks “Can you confirm if the Google SERPs are moving to AJAX, http://tinyurl.com/be5shp, if so do you think it’ll affect analytics which rely on the keyword information being in the URL?”

So, Google did roll out a change few weeks ago, which is for a very smaller percentage of users, very small like under 1% right now are doing almost what you might call java script in hand search results. So you show up on Google’s page and as you are typing you can do neat things on java script and so you can try to make things faster and you can try to make things smoother for users, there’s a lot of really smart stuff you can do. The team really didn’t think about refers and how that might break analytics packages and stuff downstream. So it’s a very small percentage of people this is being trialed on and people are thinking about, are there ways to have refers anything that you do is so useful to have refers. So ten years from now, if refers are not the conventional browser sense then may be browsers can return everything after the poun sign. For example even though after the # mark or after the poun sign isn’t officially part of the URL or URI and if browsers were to pass that along then that would help all sorts of refers and analytical packages. So the way that I think about it right now is we have try experiments as how to make search results better and faster and cleaner and it’s not the intent to break refers but we have to keep trying out new things and we do want to have the ability where analytics packages can still continue to work.

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