Getting The Search Term From Clicks From Google SSL

https://secure.grepular.com/Getting_The_Search_Term_From_Clicks_From_Google_SSL

by mike-cardwell • 16 years ago

14 13 16 years ago

secure.grepular.com

sounddust2• 16 years ago

Wouldn't this suggestion make HTTPS search useless since the search term could then be sniffed from the GET request of the link the user clicks?

I think that Google should just track it internally and report it in Analytics. It would allow the publisher to do search analytics, and it would be good for the user too because it provides more privacy than the referrer field.

mike-cardwell5• 16 years ago

If somebody can sniff the HTTP traffic of a website you're visiting, that seems to be a much bigger issue than them being able to see what the search term you googled for was.

The ideal scenario would be for both google and the website you're visiting to be SSL protected. That way you can see the referer, but nobody can sniff any of the information.

It's usually pretty easy to see what website somebody is visiting over a HTTPS connection purely because you can only host one website per IP/Port combination (I'm ignoring SNI because pretty much nobody uses it yet)

sounddust2• 16 years ago

HTTPS is slower, though; Google has been pounding into our heads for the past year that any milliseconds you can shave off your load time will result in significant improvements in page views and time spent on a site. I don't see this ever happening, although I do hope that the SPDY protocol (or something similar) becomes the standard one day, as it's both secure and fast.

agl2• 16 years ago

SNI is currently supported by about 50% of browsers in the wild. The vast majority of the non-supporting population are IE users on XP or earlier.

Since there's almost no chance that Microsoft will ever update XP, we'll probably have to wait for years until we start hitting useful numbers like 90%+ :(

astartup1• 16 years ago

SSL is not the only way that by which google hides referer from google. For sometime I was seeing urls like http://www.google.com/#q=searchterm Even this will hide queryTerm from websites.

pilif• 16 years ago

As long SSL doesn't work with name based virtual hosting (another thing where IE6 is holding us back apparently), the authors wish of people switching to SSL all over the place is a pipe-dream - even more so now that we are really running out of IP addresses.

I don't know the completely accurate numbers, but I really doubt that there are still enough IP addresses left for all the Host:-header based sites to get their own IP to be able to use SSL

Getting The Search Term From Clicks From Google SSL

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