14 DAY TRIAL // Google is announcing a change in the way it directs users to the sites they found via its encrypted search. Google will start using the "referrer" meta tag to provide limited referrer information to websites.
Browsers that support the tag, Chrome for now, will be able to recognize it and will send only the info that Google specifies to other sites. In this particular case, Google has opted to send only "origin" information, i.e. the main URL, www.google.com.
For users, this may end up saving a bit of time, since they won't have to be redirected to an intermediary page when using SSL search, which is most of the time now that it's the default.
Right now, when clicking on an organic search result users are first directed to a regular HTTP Google URL, which strips away some of the referrer data, notably the query, and then redirects users to the page they wanted.
Website owners get to see this HTTP URL in their analytics data, which contains some info, like the fact that users came from the encrypted version of Google Search, but obviously not the query.
Now, once the change is live, websites will start seeing Google's homepage URL and only that a lot more often in their analytics.
A few months ago, Google switched to HTTPS connections for search by default. Users got a secured page to do their queries enhancing their privacy and potentially their security, especially when using public wireless networks.
But the change was not without its critics, in enabling HTTPS Google also stripped the search query from the referral URL, meaning that sites only saw that someone came from Google Search but not what they searched for.
For websites, it was quite a blow as search keywords are a valuable source of information. They had access to the popular queries, via Google's Webmaster Tools, but not the full data.
The change was made even worse by the fact that Google provided the keywords to advertisers, i.e. sites that paid the company. The matter still hasn't settled, but there's not much you can do against Google.
The new change isn't quite as drastic, in fact it shouldn't affect websites any more than HTTPS search already does.