

Ask HN: Does Chrome submit URLs you visit to the Google search indexer? - aaronpk

Today I surprisingly found a page in a Google search I was looking through, but I know I'm the only person who could have possibly visited the page.<p>The page was a debugging URL I was using to monitor some server activity, and I never shared it with anyone or pasted it in any chat interface. It is even running on a non-standard port, so even visiting the root domain wouldn't lead a crawler to it.<p>Is it possible that Chrome is submitting URLs I visit to be indexed by the Google search bots?
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js4all
Was it listed on the result page or did you get it as an auto-completion
result?

This first is unlikely, the second is normal as Chrome mixes in local results
from the history store and the bookmark store.

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aaronpk
It was listed on the result page on google.com

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27182818284
I'm a little skeptical of this because tons of people use obscure URLs for
delete links or confirmation links. Wouldn't people see tons of entries in
logs of Google hitting confirmation links and havoc being created by Google
hitting one-time links for, say, deleting a file? It just feels like one of
those things that if it were true, would have already been at the top of
Hacker News several times.

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justhw
Highly possible, if you've not changed the settings in
_chrome://chrome/settings/_ to not submit anything.

To prevent future leaks, uncheck all in your chrome privacy settings except
the `Send Do not Track`

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raquo
Yes, in my experience this continued even after unchecking all possible
preferences. But last I've tried it was Chrome 17 or so. Try chromium or
disallowing a folder or whole root in /robots.txt

