January 16, 2005
Is Google Tracking Clicks?
Here's something I noticed when gathering links for yesterday's blog entry that was interesting.
It appears that Google is now (sometimes?) collecting data on individual users, the searches they perform and the links they click from the SERPs.
It is not terribly new that Google sometimes tracks clicks. They've been doing that off and on for some time now. But before it was simply a little javascript routine that recorded the SERP position number that you clicked on.
The new version I saw yesterday (and still today) is apparently associating those clicks with me, as an individual searcher. I'm not sure what is triggering this, but it may well be that I have the Google Toolbar installed and running.
Here's what I see...
When I conduct a search on Google use my IE browser with the toolbar installed, every entry is returned with a jump link that looks something like http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=5&q=http://www.somedomain.com/&e=XXXX
Where the start= number is the SERP position for the link and the &e=XXXX is a four digit number that never changes for any link or even with new searches in different IE instances. The four digit number appears to be some type of individual tracking code at first glance.
Some others who have checked this see the same type of jump links, however have a differnt four digit number. Strangely, others do not see anything like this at all. They either see a clean link (no jump) or the old javascript position tracking as an onMousedown event if they view the source code.
In fact, if I perform the same search in my Netscape, with JS and cookies enabled, I get a completely clean URL. No JS, and no jump link. This leads me to believe initially that the id number may have something to do with the Google Toolbar being installed on my IE browser.
What does it mean? Who knows.
Maybe it's Google's first foray into the Personalization of Search, though if that's the case they're simply collecting data right now. All of the folks I checked with who are seeing the jump/tracking links see the same Top 10 sites as I do for some specific searches.
It'll be interesting to see what they do with the data in the future. Right now it doesn't seem to be doing much, if anything.