I was doing some work for one of my clients this morning, setting up some online payment stuff. There were a sequence of forms, and you had to view them in order.
If you view one form out of order you’ll get an error, as it tries to examine the data posted by the previous form.
I noticed that while I was debugging, after I submitted, I’d get three or four errors from intermediate forms, after i’d posted. This was really weird.
After a lot of being confused I realised it was google, examining the pages because they had google ads on them. Presumably the google ad transmits some data about the current page to google, and if google hasn’t looked at it recently it goes and has a butchers to see what it looks like.
Presumably the ad was displaying ok, so it told google about it, but when google visited it would get a 500 response, because of the error, and so wouldn’t store the visit - so every time it gets displayed, google goes and has a look.
The Internet can be very weird sometimes.
0 Responses to “Google looking over your shoulder”