Google shares your search history? (possibly a browser bug)

[darkoshi]

I'm trying out Ubuntu on my old desktop computer. It seems I need to install some extra files for the wireless adapter to work. So on my laptop, I a did a Google search for "linux firmware wireless mn-730", and opened one of the results pages in a new Firefox window (like I normally do).

The results page that I opened (http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/7944-42-does-wireless-adapter-work-linux) included a section at the top which displayed this:
You have searched for "xxxx" . You might be interested in the following threads: ....

Where "xxxx" was a totally different search phrase, unrelated to Linux, which I had entered in Google earlier today! The page then displayed links to other pages on the site which were presumably in some way relevant to my previous search. Another section of the page included "xxxx" again - "helpfully" pre-filling an entry field with it so that I could post my question on their forums.

I was particularly miffed by this, as the search string "xxxx" in question included part of my home address.

So apparently this website is not only able to see the search phrase I used to find the website, but *also* a totally different search phrase I previously had entered in Google. This disturbs me. This is surely considered an invasion of privacy, is it not? Since when does Google share your search history with other websites? Has this been going on for a long time?

I have NoScript running, blocking most scripts. The only Google site I see marked as allowed on this page is "googlesyndication.com".

Maybe this is a bug. It seems reasonable that my actual search string "linux firmware wireless mn-730" should have been passed to the page, but perhaps my prior search string was passed by mistake.

Update: Even when I open that tomshardware.com webpage using the above link, it *still* displays my prior Google search string! Closing all my browser windows and forbidding script access for googlesyndication.com didn't get rid of it either. Clearing my cookies didn't get rid of it. It only went away after clearing my Cache, Active Logins, and Site Preferences.

I then tried to recreate the scenario of having the page display a previous search phrase, but it hasn't happened again. So it must be a bug somewhere.

Comments

[andrewducker]

How odd - I got
"You have searched for "Does MN-730 Wireless PCI Adapter Work On Linux?"
when I opened that link.

Dunno what's going on with the page you got.

[darkoshi]

That's what I get after I clear all my history and open the page from the URL directly rather than from the Google search results. If I open the page from the Google results, then it shows whatever phrase I searched on that included the page in the results... that part doesn't bother me.

But somehow the first time I opened the page from the Google results, it picked up an unrelated search phrase that I had used on Google earlier in the day. It's like Google got mixed up and sent the wrong value for the referring page. Or maybe Firefox sent the wrong value; I'm not sure how the referring URL gets sent.

[andrewducker]

Google shouldn't be sending anything. The referrer URL is sent by the browser:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referrer

So this sounds like a Firefox bug to me.

If you could replicate it then opening a bug would be good.

[darkoshi]

I wasn't able to recreate it, but I've inspected my browser history* and determined that the URL of the Google search seems to have been mangled - it included 2 search strings. The URL was like follows, where "test123" was the prior search string, and "test456" was the current search string displaying in the Google search box:

http://www.google.com/search?sa=N&hl=en&tab=lw&q=test123#sclient=psy&hl=en&biw=1267&bih=662&source=hp&q=test456&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=27b93cf21etc

It looks to me that the URL got mangled at the position #sclient. Maybe that is why it includes both search strings instead of only one. I found another similarly mangled search string in my history. That one even had 2 "q" parameters, plus a "pq" parameter, plus a "oq" parameter, all of which seemed to be phrases I had searched on today.

http://www.google.com/search?sa=N&hl=en&tab=lw&q=test123#hl=en&pq=test234&xhr=t&q=pyrun.exe&cp=5&pf=p&sclient=psy&source=hp&aq=0&aqi=&aql=&oq=pyrun&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=27b93cf21etc&biw=1267&bih=662

I haven't been able to find a page with exhaustive info on all the possible parameters in the Google search URL.

That explains how the tomshardware.com page got my prior search string - it just pulled the value of the first "q" parameter out of the referring URL.


*This utility: MozillaHistoryView came in handy. It displays the history better than Firefox 3.6 does, when the same page was opened multiple times.

[darkoshi]

On further research, the 'oq' and 'pq' parameters aren't search strings that I specifically entered, but are somehow related. When I search on "pyrun.exe", it sets "oq" to "pyrun":

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&xhr=t&q=pyrun.exe&cp=5&pf=p&sclient=psy&biw=1267&bih=662&source=hp&aq=0&aqi=&aql=&oq=pyrun