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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

The culprit is that linking to:

  https://www.google.com/appsstatus

Then loads:

  https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status

If you hit back, it goes to the URL without hash, but then instantly goes to the one with the hash.

Pretty annoying.

(If you paste the 2nd URL directly, you will not have problems.)

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So they're using history.push() rather than history.replace().

I love the history API when it's used approprately, but it is a double-edged sword that has to be used carefully. News sites injecting their homepage in history on an article sometimes make me wonder if it's worth it.

Of course it's worth it! You gained valuable insight on which sites utilise a particular dark pattern, and that they probably use others.

I don't bother clicking on TechCrunch articles for this reason.

It's a status page, doesn't seem to be a dark pattern intended to keep you engaged and garner clicks, more likely just badly written.

If anything they'd probably want you not visiting it more.

Incompetence, not malice. Who would dark pattern their status page to keep you on it longer—def an accident.

Why are there two comments back to back missing the fact they're obviously referring to this part of the comment:

> News sites injecting their homepage in history on an article sometimes make me wonder if it's worth it.

They even bring up a news site as an example.

I'm not going to assert actual malice, but I think that at Google's scale we can go further than incompetence to bare negligence.

How about canary?

I don't bother clicking TechCrunch because it redirects to https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=3_... uuid> and one of the privacy plugins on my Firefox stops me there.

For whatever reason, adblockers haven't figured out how to remove history spam.

I think a better option would be an immutable history, but pages that are loaded for less than 10 seconds grayed out in the list and pages that are inserted given a light pink background.

I'm not super concerned about history injection other than when blindly clicking the back button. I've used history injection in a legitimate use case requested by users (think master/detail when linking directly to a detail view; back goes back to the master list). I'm not sure how to unobtrusively notify of malicious history injection (like news sites) without downgrading legitimate uses.

Hopefully the answer isn't another permissions request :)

Unfortunately GWT is deprecated so the chance of this getting fixed is slim. Instead bet on this status page getting deprecated and maybe rewritten by 2021.

GWT isn't officially deprecated, although it's not getting much attention.

Both of those pollute your history, which sucks, majorly.

We really need a "update uri without side-effects, at least in #scope.

Ironically, this increases their own page’s pagerank

How?

Page views are one of the variables of the page rank algorithm

If you keep going to the site over and over, then potentially it counts as new views (albeit not unique ones)

That said Google probably exempts their own sites from page ranks since they you know, own the search engine

Google does not have insight into page views. They can only know if you clicked through to the site, not how many times you loaded that page.

and for sure they ignore that analytics GET

Yeah I would have assumed they have signaling from use of GA, GTM, Fonts ?

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