Comment by resonious
14 days ago
I've also seen Google indexing pages with random values in the path that don't get linked to statically (server asks for the URL then redirects to it immediately). I'm pretty sure they index straight out of the Chrome address bar.
Yep. I remember a similar story as GP described from a friend back in 2008. The site he was working on that wasn't linked to yet was suddenly indexed after he checked out what it looked like in the fancy new "Chrome" browser that Google had just released, causing some moderate panic on his end.
This may have been part of this issue I found a few months back, as no other explanation for how UUID URLs got indexed was found: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47769796
What the heck! That is terrible!
This is why i use Firefox
Holy crap I hope that's not true. I've also had unguessable pages indexed, though, and don't have an explanation.
It’s absolutely true. It is a documented fact. It was discovered and entered into public record during the DOJ antitrust investigation into Google Chrome.
They call the signal „popularity“ and it is a successor of the Google Toolbar signal.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-wins-signi...
So why is this not the largest GDPR case in all of history?
> „popularity“
Why are you using weird quotes?
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This is why Chrome begs you to login constantly and will do it automatically when you login to Gmail through Chrome. Everything you do in the browser (bookmarks, settings, address bar) is data about you sent to Adsense. No need for cookies when you control the browser and know who is using it.
Edit: also private browsing isn’t exactly private when you’re logged in to the browser.
Chrome sends home the urls you visit together with the page performance data (and probably more). That's how they build Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) for the most popular sites: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/crux
Something worth inspecting further. We know that Chrome stores and sends the browsing history but this is an interesting vector.
I’d be more surprised if they weren’t capturing this information.
Especially if you have autocomplete-while-searching type of features on.
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There's no reason to think it isn't true. It matches every pattern of behavior observed from every tech company.
Why don’t they also read your gmail and get your bank passwords?
And maybe have access to EVERY site actually, with “forgot password” type stuff in addition to providing oauth tokens…
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