&gt; ..so why are all of the search terms suddenly gone from google searche referer headers? Which happened at the same time google defaulted to https?<p>Not related to HTTPS at all. This happened completely independently. It happened because Google went from having search URLs like this<p><pre><code>    https:&#x2F;&#x2F;google.com&#x2F;?q=term
</code></pre>
To<p><pre><code>    https:&#x2F;&#x2F;google.com&#x2F;#q=term
</code></pre>
And the things after the anchor-mark is never in your referer. Effectively this means that the only tool on the planet who knows what people searched for before entering your site is... Google Analytics.<p>As a website owner you&#x27;re basically being co-erced into letting Google snoop on your users, at least if you want to know how they entered your site. And the fact of the matter that is most (all?) companies are willing to make that trade-off.<p>All in all pretty sad and very creepy.