Google Not Encrypting All Web Searches

At this point, I have become pretty used to Google encrypting all search queries at Google.com. At least for their organic search results. You just won’t get to see what someone searched for at Google (what keyword they used) when hitting your site. But, apparently Google is not encrypting all search queries.

From time to time, if you look at your site’s web analytics, you will notice that there are still some search queries at Google.com that are not encrypted. In other words, the keyword someone used to come to your website actually shows up, in analytics.

Let’s take a recent example. I just experienced a case where the search query was not encrypted. Take this query:

In this case, the query is:
how facebook likes can change google rank

What’s interesting to me is that I went to Google.com and tried the same search query while logged in:

And it showed up as being encrypted, as in the above search query, when I was logged in.

But, then I did it again, when I was logged out of Google:

And the search query was STILL encrypted even though I was logged out. In this case of the search query that was not encrypted, I have no way of knowing if the user was logged in or logged out. But, in this case, there is no way that someone is just ‘faking’ this search query. The search query is just too random (and I actually DO rank for that query).

In this case, I don’t think it’s this where you can stop Google from encrypting your searches.