is google becoming evil? they are breaking website keyword tracking

Googles moto says not to be evil. But a change to their search page is going to be very evil for a lot of web site owners.

Normally when someone searches on google and clicks a link in the search results, the website owner can determine what you searched for that brought you to their site. This is very useful since it makes it easy to figure out what people are interested in and can be extremely useful for websites that make money off of ads on their webpages. For example, if people who search for 'tires' come to my page a lot, then someone who sells tires would probably be more interested in buying ad space on that page then say someone who sells cookies (unless they are cookies shaped like tires ... mmmm...cookie tires). 

However, a new change google is starting to push out will break this. This means a LOT of web site owners who depend on this information are going to suddenly find it missing. This is information that is basically a web standard for all search engines.  The ability to track keywords is something that works with all the major search engines.

You can tell if this is happening the next time you do a search by looking at the url after you submit your search term.

If the url looks something like this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=dogs

Then when you click on one of the links in that search result, the website you go to will know you searched for 'dogs'.

However, if the url looks something like this:

http://www.google.com/#q=dogs

And you click one of the links, they wont know what you searched for.

Hopefully google will reconsider deploying this new change, because it's going to hurt a lot of websites out there.

Chrome - the google web browser

So some of you may or may not have heard by now that google, somewhat suddenly, announced availability of a browser they developed. I'm typing this blog post using it. You can download it from www.google.com/chrome - it will live side by side with IE, FF etc.

It does have some rendering quirks on various sites, but for the most part it works. And when it does work, it works fast. It renders pages noticeably much faster then IE6 does. And perhaps even a tad bit faster then FF3. It has tabs which sit all the way at the top of the window. And one nice thing about them is that each tab runs in it's own process so if one crashes, only the one tab goes down. It comes with it's own task manager to monitor the tabs (shift-esc to bring it up) which will show you the cpu, memory and network usage of each tab, plus plugins.

Another nice little feature when you first start it (and it starts as fast as it renders) are medium sized icons on the start page of the most frequently visited sites. I also noticed it will let you resize a multi-line text box it make it easier to type.

And for those of you who prefer to surf anonymously, it comes with an incognito mode, which will basically erase the history, cookies etc of that session once you close the browser. 

I also just noticed one other little feature. The little icon in the corner of the tab will turn grey and rotate counter-clockwise if its trying to connect to a website, and it will turn blue and rotate clockwise if it's downloading content from a site.

If you are using it and notice anything else cool (or not cool) about it, please feel free to let me know in the comments.