I agree that the amount of information a well-tagged website can collect on users is frightening, but I don't think that stripping search keyword data from the referrer is the solution. I think Gabriel is going after the wrong thing.
Here's why:
A good Search Engine will never send a user to a page that isn't textually relevant to the search they entered. In 99.9% of cases, the text they entered is ON the page they hit. So if a user searches for: [SOMETHING CREEPY] they will be hitting a page that already has [SOMETHING CREEPY] published.
To put it another way: "Your Keyword data is never going to give a website something it didn't already have. It's just going to reveal what pieces of its content are of interest to you."
But in this case it's the site choosing to share the search term with the ad network -- and www.medicinenet.com/gout/article.htm (my first result for gout) has a pretty good idea that you searched for gout. It's also a rare enough term (this is my first time ever typing it) that any calculation on statistically improbable phrases will know I searched for "gout", not "article".
In most cases the "leakage" is pretty minor from search engine to page, the big leak is from page to ad network.
Still as an advertising demographic "someone researching gout for whatever reason" is more valuable to target than a viewer you know nothing about -- even if half of them are researching the Henry VIII, the other half have a new condition and they need to buy something if only they knew what.
"But in this case it's the site choosing to share the search term with the ad network"
in the same way that most users probably aren't aware of this, most publishers probably aren't aware as well. i, for one, never considered that the referrer might be passed along to the ad networks i use on my sites. it simply never occurred to me. i definitely didn't choose to share that information with them.
agreed. I guess I left out my suggestion for what the problem really is:
If you are concerned about Ad Networks having so much data on you, clear your cookies and block cookies from them. Then they will never be able to string together more than one piece of data.
I agree that the amount of information a well-tagged website can collect on users is frightening, but I don't think that stripping search keyword data from the referrer is the solution. I think Gabriel is going after the wrong thing.
Here's why: A good Search Engine will never send a user to a page that isn't textually relevant to the search they entered. In 99.9% of cases, the text they entered is ON the page they hit. So if a user searches for: [SOMETHING CREEPY] they will be hitting a page that already has [SOMETHING CREEPY] published.
To put it another way: "Your Keyword data is never going to give a website something it didn't already have. It's just going to reveal what pieces of its content are of interest to you."