On October 18, Google announced that it would begin pushing users with a Google account to Google's encrypted search homepage. The move to make searches more private has caused an uproar among search marketers and SEO experts, who will now get limited information about how site visitors found them.

The move is part of Google's ongoing response to concerns over the privacy of its services, especially for people connecting from public WiFi networks exposed by exploits like Firesheep. Google has offered secure search since April of 2010. But as the change is rolled out, any Google user that has logged into a Google account will be sent to the HTTP Secure search page by default, and their search queries and results returned by Google over the HTTPS connection will be encrypted.

It also means that most of the sites logged-in users visit as a result of their query won't have any idea how the user found them. “When you search from https://www.google.com,” Google search product manager Evelyn Kao wrote in Google's official blog, “websites you visit from our organic search listings will still know that you came from Google, but won't receive information about each individual query.” Paid search results will still pass that information to the advertised site when users click to visit them. The only way for site owners to get any information on what drives signed-in Google users to their sites will be through Google Webmaster Tools—which provides the top search terms used for a site for the past 30 days, without any details on the page visited within a site.

There are no figures available from Google on what percentage of users make searches while logged in. But the changes mean that anyone who goes from one of Google's other services, such as Gmail or Google Plus, to the Google search page will automatically have their searches encrypted. The potential loss of detailed information on “organic” searches has raised the ire of search marketers, as Search Engine Land's Matt McGee reported. Some accused Google of making the change in order to push more sites to pay for search placement.

Tony Verre, the CEO of Silver Arc Search Marketing in Milwaukee wrote in Search Engine Journal that the move creates a “double standard,” where those who can afford paid placement in search results get access to a wealth of data on the user's search history while those sites that are unpaid results for a search—and ranked highly by Google's own algorithms for what the user is looking for—get nothing. "You don’t have to look too hard to see this move places [paid search] data on a pedestal,” Verre wrote. “It’s unfiltered by privacy now and you get true conversion data from them.”

Meanwhile, website owners that have collected referrer data and tracked search terms through other tools will be left in the dark.