

Getting The Search Term From Clicks From Google SSL - mike-cardwell
https://secure.grepular.com/Getting_The_Search_Term_From_Clicks_From_Google_SSL

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pilif
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

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sounddust
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.

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mike-cardwell
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)

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agl
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%+ :(

~~~
mike-cardwell
For that matter, does Googles bot support websites which use SNI?

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astartup1
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.

