Comment by omoikane
3 years ago
Referer is not quite the same as how it was. In recent years, the default behavior in most cases is for the browser to either send just the origin, or no referer at all.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...
"Origin" means no path, so the referer might tell me which search engine the user used, but not what search query was done. It's much better than in the old days, where I might even see someone's session ID in the referer.
YouTube got around this in the earlier days since the referer header didn’t sent query strings. Maybe if referer hadn’t existed, YouTube urls would look like /watch/ViDeOID