Google redirector broken; Are you losing traffic?
An anonymous tipper just told me about this: Log into your Google account, make sure you have personalized search turned on and then search for [inurl:read.php? mysql] and click on the first result. You'll get a redirector script message like the one below:
(click for full size)
How many people do you think click that link? No doubt sites are losing traffic this way.
Anyone else out there facing the same issue? Yes, many more. To find them, search for [forum inurl:read.php?]. The issue seems to be special characters (commas) in the URLs.
Check your sites folks.
Update: The referrs coming from the notice will be different from the ones if the direct search result was clicked and worked. So it will show up clearly in your log files.
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March 1st, 2007 at 7:23 am
Good catch, Pierre!
The redirector catches “unknown” URLs and displays that page. It is also used for various other things within Google, it looks like they just missed some test-cases when testing it (and sometimes you have to wonder what people were doing when they decided on a specific URL scheme…).
Redirectors like this one have been used for phishing (linking with a google.com domain to some untrusted site), so plugging open redirectors like this one is a good thing.
March 1st, 2007 at 8:44 am
I would have thought that Google would have a large enough sample of URLs that all cases will be tested against.
As for phishing: would that be caught with Google’s amazing toolbar?
Pierre
March 1st, 2007 at 6:23 pm
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