Google.com Referrers

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Google.com Referrers

http://www.google.com

DavidT

12:54 pm on May 8, 2003 (gmt 0)

Had a visit from an IP in Indonesia, referrer was just plain [google.com....] Don't think I've seen that before.

dmorison

6:45 pm on May 8, 2003 (gmt 0)

I frequently see referral URLs that are not (and would not be) linking to my site.

I think a bug has crept into a recent user agent (poss. IE6 on XP) that under a certain set of conditions will send the URL of a recently visited page as the referrer field in a request generated by you simply typing a URL into the address bar.

jesserud

10:17 pm on May 10, 2003 (gmt 0)

If a user hits "I'm Feeling Lucky", the referer will be [google.com...] rather than [google.com...] . URLs that redirect immediately are never sent as referers. That's probably why you saw a [google.com...] referer.

You can see what referer your browser sent for a page you're viewing in your browser using this bookmarklet:
javascript:alert(document.referrer)
(Type that URL into the address bar, or bookmark it and then click it whenever you want to see the referer for the page you're viewing.)

Mozilla Firebird's "Page Info" dialog (Ctrl+I) also shows referers.

jesserud

10:24 pm on May 10, 2003 (gmt 0)

dmorison: For a long time, Mozilla had a bug that caused it to send incorrect referers in a certain case (not involving the address bar). I filed a security bug (bug 201839) about that issue and a related issue in the middle of April 2003 and it was fixed within a few days.

jim_w

10:05 am on May 11, 2003 (gmt 0)

It could also be they were just a google�s homepage and entered your URL in the address bar? When I want to check my competitors, I will do a search for �buggy software� and then enter their URL in the address bar. (GRIN)

jesserud

10:37 am on May 11, 2003 (gmt 0)

jim_w: if you type a URL into a web browser's address bar, the browser doesn't send a referer unless the browser is very buggy. I'm not aware of any browsers that do. Sending a referer in that case would be against the HTTP spec and I would consider it a privacy hole.

jim_w

10:56 am on May 11, 2003 (gmt 0)

Well, ya know, I never actually checked, because i thought that a http_referer was just the page one came from. But perhaps you must click on a link to get a http_referer? Is that what you are saying?

jim_w

11:20 am on May 11, 2003 (gmt 0)

I stand, well actually I'm sitting, corrected. I just wrote a small script...

#!/usr/bin/perl
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser); # this prints out errors to the screen (mostly for debugging)

# Print Beginning of HTML
print "Content-Type: text/html\n\n";
print "<html><head><title>test</title></head>\n";
print "<body><h1>Ref Check</h1>\n";
print "$ENV{'HTTP_REFERER'} ";
# Print End of HTML
print "</body></html>\n";

and when entering the url from google, nothing was returned. So I set a page with the link, and when clicked on, it returned HTTP_REFERER. Thanks for correcting me jesserud. One learns something new everyday hopefully.