I've recently noticed that when searching with Google the url gets appened with &sg_ss. I have already checked and this is only with Brave. The letters after it also seem randomly generated. I won't send the url incase it contains something personal. You can try it yourself. Info incase it's a bug on my end:

OS: Fedora 43
Brave: latest flatpak

Did anyone else notice this?

  • Talking about when you search directly from Google or when you're using Google as the default search within the browser and doing the search from the address bar?

    parent

    Both. When searching directly from google.com or from the search bar. Manually removing the url reloads the page twice with it again. Adding $removeparam to shields causes the page to reload forever.

    parent root

    The reason I asked is Brave actually has referral parameters in the default search engines. So like if you go to brave://settings/searchEngines and go to edit some, such as Google, it would likely show the url with %s query as {google:baseURL}search?q=%s&{google:RLZ}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}{google:assistedQueryStats}{google:searchFieldtrialParameter}{google:language}{google:prefetchSource}{google:searchClient}{google:sourceId}{google:contextualSearchVersion}ie={inputEncoding}

    When in reality all it needs is https://www.google.com/search?q=%s

    Many of the default engines have these referral codes as it's a traditional behavior in browsers. When users do searches with it, the browser companies get paid by the search engine. So they have the identifiers there to make sure they know it was done. There are a lot of other things in there as well. If you want to see the breakdown, AI answer is at https://gemini.google.com/share/21e25c574a8d

    parent root

    I wasn't sure about the &sg_ss so also relied on AI. It's saying:

    The parameter &sg_ss is a specific tracking token used by Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Brave, Edge) to tell Google's servers exactly how you interacted with the search suggestions in your address bar (the Omnibox).

    It stands for Search Guide - Suggestion State (or Session).

    When you start typing in the address bar and a list of suggestions appears, Google doesn't just want to know what you searched for; they want to know how you found it.

    • If you clicked the 3rd suggestion down, the sg_ss parameter encodes that "index" (Position #3).
    • This helps Google determine if their "Autocomplete" algorithm is actually helpful. If everyone clicks the 1st result, the algorithm is working well; if they click the 5th, the top results need improvement.

    If you type "weather" and hit Enter, the URL usually won't have this parameter because you manually submitted the query. However, if you type "wea" and then click the suggestion "weather in Miami," Google appends sg_ss to note that you accepted a suggestion rather than finishing the typing yourself.

    parent root

    Sorry one more reply. It's also suggesting as I did earlier about the "clean" entry. So if don't use the normal default but make another entry for Google under Site Search and then make it your default...but not testing to verify. At least tried to address. And yeah, Shields wouldn't necessarily do anything to stop it.

    How to remove it

    If you want to stop your browser from sending this extra data, you can "clean" your default search engine URL in your settings.

    1. Go to your browser's Search Engine Settings.
    2. Find the "Google" entry (or create a new custom one).
    3. Change the URL to the "clean" version:https://www.google.com/search?q=%s

    By using that simplified version, you effectively strip away the sg_ss, RLZ, and other tracking tokens, sending only your search term and nothing else.

    parent root

    Thanks for writing all this, but the problem is that it gets added even if I enter the url directly into the search bar.

    parent root

  • Same things happen with duck duck go lol,

    parent