Google’s Amit Singhal had a discussion with Danny Sullivan on stage at SMX West on Tuesday evening. Danny has now shared a section of that (above) in which the controversial “not provided” subject comes up. Singhal says there may soon be an announcement related to some changes with that – specifically with how Google is currently handling this for organic vs. paid search.

In case you have no idea what I’m talking about, Google implemented secure search a few years ago, and by doing so, it no longer provided publishers with the keywords searchers were using to find pages for those using it. It has, however, continued to show this data to advertisers.

This fact has been brought up repeatedly (often by Sullivan), but Google hasn’t had a lot to say for itself, which is why these new comments from Singhal are pretty interesting. He said (via Sullivan):

Over a period of time, we [Google’s search and ad sides] have been looking at this issue…. we’re also hearing from our users that they would want their searches to be secure … it’s really important to the users. We really like the way things have gone on the organic side of search.

I have nothing to announce right now, but in the coming weeks and months as [we] find the right solution, expect something to come out.

Just what “comes out” remains to be seen, but it seems unlikely that publishers will be getting those keywords back. More likely is that advertisers will lose the data.

Image via YouTube