sorry, maybe a bad example on my part, my point is that querystring parameters being passed should include the search terms used on that search engine is something of a rule of thumb more so than a standard... but i don't know that there are any standards built on top of the http referrer other than this is how google and many others operated, so these reporting companies wrote code that relied on that, rather than coding to a standard.
I can see your point, but if Google adds that capability to Google Analytics they will have a significant advantage over their competitors. So the question is not simply about following an unofficial standard.
How would they even do that if there's no query data in the referer? Set a cookie on google.com and then read it back from analytics.google.com is the only thing I can think of.
