Many of the comments seem to assume that websites are entitled to know what I searched for. I think that it would be a great step to give millions of people a little more privacy, even if it's just an accidental side effect of a change to Ajax.
I feel that the benefit in letting webmasters know what their users are looking for outweighs any privacy gains to be had. If people are that concerned about their privacy they could always set their browser to not send the referrer. I doubt that this move has anything to do with concern over user privacy.
making it about privacy is playing an emotional card when it should really be a technical discussion. Hiding a query string isn't "privacy" in any meaningful sense. It's beneficial for you to tell a webmaster what it is that you have come looking for.
I'm in two minds about the issue though. Google don't have a contract to supply the searchterm on outgoing links (via the referrer or otherwise) but for many applications it was a pretty useful thing for them to do. Arguably their only resource there is a single search page which is dynamic depending on your query string - to me this says ?q=searchterm is the semantic way to represent it, but hey it's their application so they can "design" it however they want. On the other hand, urls are about as explicit as you can get on the web and google's are more publicised than most. Changing your public API is asking for trouble.
It's beneficial to the webmaster, not the user. If most people were presented with a choice of whether or not to provide this information, they'd decline.
It's win-win. If a webmaster knows that traffic is coming in for a specific term and how long that traffic sticks around, they can decide whether they have sufficient content there to keep those users happy. If not, they can add content or tweak the site, which benefits the user.
If a user comes across a site because of a google search, it's more likely than not that he's there for a specific purpose and does not plan on returning. If the webmaster is able to glean useful information from his behavior and use that to improve his site, then it's possible that users in general are better off, but the original user is long gone.
You walk into a store, can't find what you were looking for and leave without a word. You keep doing the same for a month, and keep blaming the store for not stocking enough items. Wouldn't just telling the seller what you're looking for benefit both of you?
That analogy doesn't really work - if they came to your site from a particular search term it would seem likely the content is already there.
Even if people are reaching a site based on a mismatched keyword, I wouldn't have thought many people check their logs and update their site because they're getting a lot of hits from a particular term they don't have much for?
True. I was kinda looking at it from my own perspective. My blog usually gets hits from people looking for "college education india". I can retarget my content towards college students, put up a few AdSense ads and make some cash. Of course I wouldn't do that, since my blog is strictly personal, but I think it's a viable strategy to drive more content towards your site.
I would even support this argument if google wasn't evil and wouldn't store personalized search logs themselves. Then this would indeed be a privacy win.
The way things are now this smells suspiciously like an attempt to further monopolize useful data that were available to webmasters before and kicking out competitors in the web analytics space. You might argue (with good reasons) that these data should have remained private from the beginning, but then google should stop logging them first and only then remove them from the results. The other way round it's "do as we say, not as we do."
