[LINK] Why does Firefox send non-URL text in the location bar to Google etc.?

Robin Whittle rw at firstpr.com.au
Mon Jan 3 18:47:05 AEDT 2011


If most people don't know, or don't care about information leakage
like this, then its a worry.  I didn't know about it and at present I
don't know how to stop it.


I intended to copy and paste a URL into the Firefox (WinXP 3.6.13)
location bar.   I hit enter before I realised I had actually pasted a
phrase from an email I had just been editing.  The browser sensed it
wasn't a URL and sent it to Google, so within a fraction of a second I
had Google results for the words in this phrase.

Typing arbitrary text, without "http://" and hitting Enter does the
same thing every time.  On another similar machine, with the same
browser, the same thing happened but to a Yahoo search engine.  (This
browser had a Yahoo toolbar, which mine doesn't - mine has no special
toolbars.)

I couldn't find where in the settings for Firefox to control this
pernicious behaviour.

Once text is sent to Google, Yahoo or whatever, there's no real limits
on what could happen to it.  I recall that the Google headquarters has
a huge video screen showing text of search terms in real-time.  Search
terms could be collated, used in various ways and potentially made
available to the public, to investigators or to advertisers.

To the right of the Location bar/line (further to the right in the
Navigation bar, which includes the Location bar) is a smaller "search
engine" bar/line where text can be entered and a magnifier glass thing
clicked.  I never use this, but I understand many people do.  I always
search with Google Advanced via the top entry in my bookmarks:

  http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en&num=100

and my settings (saved in a cookie, I guess) are to turn off Google
Instant. (Google Instant seems to do as described below for Chrome's
location bar: "predictions and results appear while typing").

The default setting for this browser search bar (I never changed it)
is to send the query search to English Wikipedia.  There's an arrow to
the left of this, next to a little box thing with "W" in it, for
Wikipedia, and clicking this arrow leads to a dialogue box for
managing search engines.   On this list, Wikipedia is in bold, and the
list itself contains, in this order:

  Google
  Yahoo.co.uk
  Answers.com
  Chambers (UK)
  Creative Commons
  ebay.co.uk
  alot.com
  Wikipedia (en)

I never put this stuff in.  Changing the order has no effect on the
browser's behaviour in sending unrecognised text straight to a search
engine.

MSIE 8 does a similar thing, sending the text to
http://en.wikipedia.org.   There's a similar search engine bar,
containing Wikipedia and Windows Live Search, with Wikipedia being the
default (as far as I recall), but changing these settings doesn't
affect the behaviour of the browser with non-URL text.

The Google Chrome browser is even worse.  As I type the non-URL text,
or any other text, into the location bar, it is sending it out to its
servers, which send back suggestions in a pull-down list below the
bar.  Each keystroke (or a few in quick succession, I guess) generates
packets to and from syd01s01-in-f100.1e100.net - which is a Google server.

  - Robin






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