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I blogged about this back in October when Google announced that users logged into a Google account would have their search engine key words encrypted. Initially this was only switched on for US based Google users and people in the UK and Europe with Google accounts had to opt in.

 

We tracked the effect on the FTSE100 web sites we monitor and saw that around 5% of search terms were being encrypted. As the audiences visiting FTSE100 web sites are largely non-US based this was in line with expectations.

 

However on 06 March the automatic opt-in for Google users for search encryption was added for country specific domains (.co.uk, .fr, .de). Since then we have seen a large increase in the number of searches being encrypted, with 16% of Google search referrals returning as unknown.

 

This is significantly higher than the “single-digit percentages” quoted by Matt Cutts of Google in an interview with SearchEngineland.com. This is obviously a significant amount of traffic, with Google, the dominant search engine, providing over 90% of search engine traffic to FTSE100 web sites. 

 

We have been working on ways to use Google webmaster tools and landing page analysis to fill in the gaps in the data. If you are interested in learning about this then drop us a line.

 

What level of search keyword encryption are you seeing? Let us know in the comments below.