
Ask HN: Does Google Index “Secret” URLs Only Shared Through Gmail? - macinjosh
I am seeing files I upload to S3 in Google search results. I am not sure how Google found the URLs to these files as I&#x27;ve only shared them in email (Gmail).
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josephcole
Do you mind if I quote a couple of your articles as long as I provide credit
and sources back to your website?
[http://www.juegosfriv2019.org/](http://www.juegosfriv2019.org/) My blog is in
the very same area of interest as yours and my visitors would certainly
benefit from a lot of the information you present here.
[http://www.juegosfriv2017.link/](http://www.juegosfriv2017.link/) Please let
me know if this okay with you. Thank you!

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mattbgates
Go into Incognito and see if they are showing up there. Google might show you
files from Google Drive and other places because you are logged into your
Google Account, but it may not show up for anyone else.

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macinjosh
They do show up in incognito.

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mattbgates
Well then, Google is just being Google and indexing everything. You might have
to delete it or check your account settings to see if you can make it private.

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ParameterOne
Google definitely reads your email (gmail). As an example, if I have the word
_attachment_ written in my email and then attempt to send the email without
any attachments, google will tell me that I used the word attachment in my
email but didn't attach anything.

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MichaelBurge
"Reads your email" is ambiguous. All unencrypted email must be read just to
transmit it over the network, or to store it on disk. Sounds silly, but the
example you gave is actually even more benign: It could be done with
Javascript that never sends anything across the network.

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claudiulodro
You should put a robots.txt file in the S3 bucket if you don't want things in
it indexed.

I (kind-of) doubt that they found the files through your e-mail, but the files
in your S3 bucket are technically available for indexing since you don't have
a robots.txt.

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macinjosh
I do have a robots.txt, but for whatever reason its not found by Google

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iurisilvio
Are you using a custom domain? Robots.txt must be in your root folder, doesn't
work with S3 urls.

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macinjosh
yeah its the S3 URLs that are causing the problem

