This news item from a few weeks ago revealed that when users created a “public link” of their Claude chat history, that chat history ended up in Google’s search queries.
Aren’t these urls supposed to be more or less undiscoverable by virtue of the long string of random characters that they contain?
How did Google discover those urls?
Did these people publish the urls somewhere publically themselves?
Or did Google “fish” them out of their gmail inbox or something like that?
Someone once proved Google does crawl links found in the Chrome url bar. I don’t feel like trying to find that article now but I’m sure it was a case some case ago.
At one point their browser extensions would scan search terms entered on pages and spider any results that appeared. The Bing team found that and created a honeypot where Bing would produce nonsense internal links for certain search terms, and then they’d see the Googlebot crawl those pages within a few minutes.