Are Google SERPs moving to Ajax?

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Here's a question from over the Atlantic, Owen in London asks:

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Can you confirm if the Google SERPs (search engine result pages)

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are moving to AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript),

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if so, how do you think it will affect analytics

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which rely on the keyword information being in the URL?

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So, Google did roll out a change a few weeks ago

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which - for a very small percentage of users

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very small, like under 1% right now -

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doing almost what you might call JavaScript enhanced search results.

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So, you show up on Google's page and as you're typing you can do neat things with JavaScript.

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So, you can try make things faster,

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you can try to make things smoother for users.

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There's a lot of really smart stuff that you can do.

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The team didn't really think about referrers and how that might break analytics packages and stuff downstream.

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So, you know, it's a very small percentage of people that this has been sort of trialed on,

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and people are thinking about, are there ways to have referrers?

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Anything that you can do is very useful if you can have referrers,

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so, if ten years from now referrers are now where the conventional browser stands,

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then browsers can maybe return everything after the pound sign.

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For example, that would, even though after the hash mark or after the pound sign isn't officially part of the URL

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or URI,

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if browsers were to pass that along,

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then that would help all sorts of referrers and analytic packages.

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So, the way that I think about it right now is,

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we have to try experiments with how to make the search results better and faster and cleaner.

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And it's not the intent to break referrers,

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but we have to keep trying out new things.

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And we do want to have the ability where analytics packages can still continue to work.