869398 - Don't pollute search URLs with branding

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Search, defect)

Description

[Dan Jacobson]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:22.0) Gecko/20130426 Firefox/22.0 Iceweasel/22.0a2
Build ID: 20130426004017

Steps to reproduce:

Searched for "barfowitz" in the handy box provided.


Actual results:

This produces
https://www.google.com/search?q=barfowitz&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:unofficial&client=iceweasel-a
in the URL bar. Clicking "images" then even gives
https://www.google.com/search?q=barfowitz&client=iceweasel-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:unofficial&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=UeqIUamiEc-HkgXi84CwDQ&ved=0CAoQ_AUoAQ&biw=1138&bih=493


Expected results:

The communication you are trying to establish with your search providers should be better handled via e.g., the Referer HTTP header. You can even add some special spice there upon searches.

Not only are you giving the user these unwieldy URLs that they don't want to share with their friends anymore... but also if they do, and their friends use a different browser.. well don't you see how now the tallies are being tilted!
Firefox would be "earning" other browser's "money"!
One little Facebook post with such a URL will skew the results a lot!
So clearly this belongs somewhere other than the URL.

You might say that Google will detect that it is not Firefox(/Iceweasel) anymore via the Referer, well use that in the first place then!

See also bug 575960.

Comment 1

[Dan Jacobson]

Hmm, it seems even searching "the old fashioned way" makes
http://www.google.com.tw/#site=&source=hp&q=barfowitz&oq=barfowitz&gs_l=hp.3..0i13l10.3480.7336.0.7628.9.9.0.0.0.0.120.975.0j9.9.0...0.0...1c.1.12.hp.LIqWzIKjNXs&bav=on.2,or.&bvm=bv.45960087,d.dGI&fp=99ed907658369deb&biw=1024&bih=429
i.e., Google makes them quite long on its own.

Hmm, it seems only
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=barfowitz
doesn't get changed by the search engine itself to something long...

OK, I guess one must clean up the URLs by hand these days before sharing.
E.g., http://www.google.com/search?q=barfowitz
is apparently the pristine perfect URL to share in this case.

Comment 2

[Maria Grazia Alastra [:mga]]

Confirmed on Windows 7 64 bits with Firefox 20.0.1, User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:20.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/20.0, Build ID: 20130409194949.

Comment 3

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Some parameters are unfortunately necessary for allowing our partners to properly measure search volume. We have other existing bugs on reducing this set to the minimum and adjusting the values of some parameters.

Comment 4

[Dan Jacobson]

OK but I had some valid points.