Yes, for example referers from Google Mail are no longer counted as Google Searches.

OK. Thanks for the reply. Will take some getting used to ;)

Having watched this now for a couple of days, I'm not sure I understand (or like) how this works.
I'm getting google.*** both as search and referrer hits for example, while the latter now - by far - overtake the first.
The unfortunate part is that the referrer hits don't include search keywords or SR, which greatly reduces the possibilities to adapt or generate content to visitor preferences and track content in terms of SEO and ranking.

Search referers are detected by special params search engines use to define search keywords

For example along with some other params Google uses "q" which means that referers like the one below will be detected as "search referer"
http://google.com/search?q=keyword

However in some situations Google doesn't add "q" param, making it impossible for us to tell whether it's a search referer or not. So we chose to mark referes as "search" only when we can detect such search params in known websites. B2evolution is not the only app on the market that uses this kind of detection methods, it's a common practice.

You can look at /blogs/inc/sessions/model/_search_engines.php for the list of known search websites and params they use to identify search referers.

Alex, Google now hides the keywords MOST of the time, not just in "some situations".

If your latest refactoring of the code relies on detecting "q" to qualify a hit as a search referer, then please think of a more appropriate way to qualitfy the hit. There must be another part of the URL that can be used to detect it's a search.

(Of course we won't show keywords we don't have, but we still want to show it was a search hit).

We can probably detect "/search" URI. It looks like that URI is always present

Alex, Google now hides the keywords MOST of the time, not just in "some situations".

I only saw that on referers like this

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web.......

The "q" param is usually (not always!) empty, and there's no "/source" URI. How do you want to handle that? Treat any referer matching "google.com" as search referer?

Beats me, but I appreciate you guys understand my dilemma ;)
What I can say is that in terms of what I get out of the stats, the previous method (which apparently DID qualify google, bing, yahoo c.s. as "search") was more useful, even if maybe technically not "correct".
Moreover, with a previous average of - like - 20 referrer hits a day, in my case, it was much easier to catch and BL spam referrers...

THX! (as always)