We’re sure on more than one occasion you have copied and pasted a Google search URL. Maybe you are working with friends or colleagues on a project and you’re just copying and pasting some research you’ve found. Seems pretty innocent and straightforward enough, doesn’t it?
However according to a post by Jeremy Rubin, you might want to be more careful of copying and pasting search results, simply because it will reveal what you had previously searched for. If you were searching for some sensitive information, it will be revealed. If you are not, it could potentially be a bit embarrassing as well, like looking up medical conditions you don’t want people to know you’ve got.
Want to try it for yourself? Open up a browser like Chrome or Firefox. Type into the search bar anything, and when Google loads the results, type another query into the search bar inside the website. You will then notice that your URL will show what you had searched previously, and what the new search is.
According to Rubin, this opens up the potential for phishing attacks where the request might be innocent, but because we don’t pay attention to the URL, it could give away some clues about who we are. Rubin claims to have informed Google about this but to date they have not done anything about it, so until then we guess you should be a bit more careful about the URLs you are copying and pasting.