For many marketers, last month’s announcement from Google that all searches would now run through their SSL encryption was quite devastating. It meant those with websites would no longer be able to see what keywords people were searching for when they arrived at their site. A writer from Search Engine Land found a way to disable the encryption when people perform searches.
Adding ?nord=1 to a search URL will direct the search away from the encryption. For example, if you are searching for “Performance Marketing”, the normal URL from Google would be:
https://www.google.com/#q=performance+marketing
This will create an encrypted and secured search (note the s on the https area). Even typing in the search URL without the S manually won’t keep your search from being encrypted. If, however, you manually add in the ?nord=1 to the URL, you aren’t sent through the encryption service. Your URL will then look like this:
http://www.google.com/?nord=1#q=performance+marketing
Of course, this must be done on a manual basis, and for every search, so this isn’t a real viable solution to the problem marketers are having. It may be possible to build plugins or toolbars to direct all searches in this way, though getting searchers to use it would be difficult.
For marketers, it may be a slight glimpse of hope that there is another way around the secured search done by Google, but we are nowhere close to restoring the full information provided before the secured search was put in place.
