Google's Delilah Moment

Since the dawn of web search, when you searched on Google, clicked on an unpaid search result and were delivered to a company's website, Google would in its referral URL let the website you were directed to know what keyword/search you'd performed to get there in the first place. This search keyword referral data has been one of the foundational pieces of information upon which millions of websites around the world have relied in order to better serve customers.

Now that Google is a wantonly blood-sucking, monopolistic parasite of a toll-road upon which the global economy must travel, they have - under the guise of protecting consumer privacy (yes, isn't *that* a laugh given their collusion w/the NSA?) just today stopped giving ANY keyword referral data to websites for organic search traffic. As you can imagine, this will immediately and materially reduce transactional websites' ability to understand

1) why people are coming to their site;
2) what product(s) to show them;
3) how to optimize conversion rates

To use a biblical analogy, being able to search online is super-human strength, Samson is the world's advertisers, and Delilah (the Philistine prostitute who betrays Samson) is Google. Gioacchino Assereto's 'The Philistines Gouging out Samson's Eyes' captures what advertisers around the world are starting to feel who've come to rely on Google for traffic.

If someone plans a spontaneous protest at Google HQ today, I suggest the throng walk around the streets and charming Google walkways acting as though they've just gone blind, as that's pretty much what's just happened. The only way to 'see' going forward = buy AdWords.