Google non-SSL search not passing the "q" parameter with keyword

Question

I am building a web analytics application for search engine traffic only and right now I am looking into providing some information about keywords that Google does not show. Like not provided keyword.

I know that Google will not send you the keyword if the user did a secure search (SSL), but if the search is non-SSL, it should send it with all the parameters.

So I have a referral coming from Google that is HTTP, not HTTPS, it does send some parameters, but it leaves the keyword parameter q blank.

This is the example:

http://www.google.es/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=9&ved=0CIUBEBYwCA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fsome-page-here&ei=FVOOUfLWJe2O7Aa7vYDgDg&usg=AFQjCNGD0Rr7gWxrdLaHgQ-SLjjDNruWpQ&sig2=83GBx7n-PYvKyOfUZHRCmw&bvm=bv.46340616,d.ZGU

As you see there's no keyword in the q parameter, anyone knows what kind of search is this and why it leaves it empty?

Answer 1

That can be normal.

If you're building an app for this, one thing that might be worth looking into is integrating the top search query data from Google's Webmaster Tools (since it does include these queries, even if no referrer was sent for the request). There's a rough "API" to get that data (see the blog post) with a reference implementation in Python, and as far as I recall, a 3rd-party implementation in PHP that you could build on.