Google have announced that more of their search traffic will be served from an encrypted SSL web server. What this means is that anyone arriving on your site will no longer pass through the keywords using in the search. This currently only applies to users who explicitly search from https://encrypted.google.com/. This latest change means anyone who is logged into a Google account will end up on the encrypted search.

This move suggests a trend of Google moving everyone to encrypted traffic, though undoubtedly it has taken some time to get the more complex and more difficult-to-scale SSL infrastructure built up to support the traffic. This is undoubtedly a good thing for security and freedom. The analogy that cypherpunks use is that if everyone wrote their letters on postcards, anyone who put a letter in an envelope would be suspicious. By putting all search traffic behind encryption, your boss, your network staff, your ISP, your censorship-obsessed control freak government or your despotic dictator won't be able to see what you're searching, whether you have something to hide or not.

The downside for online marketers, and particularly search marketers, is that organic search keywords will no longer be available in your web analytics data. The search keywords are passed through on the Referrer header when someone clicks on a link in a search engine, but only when the search engine is served by HTTP. When served from HTTPS (SSL) the referrer is not sent by standards-compliant browsers.

What this means is that search marketers will need to rely on search engine-supplied data to know what keywords people are searching for, and will have very little useful feedback of organic optimisation strategies. We're going to be flying blind.