NS has just stopped working with Google

[just another anon]

I'm switching to something else for my searches

i'm always looking to replace google - got any suggestions?

[GµårÐïåñ]

Giorgio, this is EXACTLY what I emailed you about and it just happened again on another machine. Just so you know and it seems the relation to RefControl was coincidental, its something else.

[GµårÐïåñ]

i'm always looking to replace google - got any suggestions?

My friend Tom used to suggest Scroogle but Google has broken their service, so he has been suggesting StartPage.com so good luck.

[anonymous coward #43]

I'm having the same problem. On a Firefox (11.0) session with NoScript (2.3.5) enabled (and all scripts disabled) (and cookies disabled, which doesn't seem related), every time I search for anything on Google, either via an installed search engine or from the website (with or without SSL), I land on one of those 404-pages. I tested with a different session that didn't have NoScript installed, and voila, it works fine. Further testing with the first session (NoScript enabled with all scripts off), and a different User Agent string (e.g. "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0"), works fine as well. Don't know what the guys at Google were smoking, but they should get the old stuff back

[orphan]

Searching on some country code variants of google search still work for me. Small sample -

works:

google.co.jp
google.co.uk
google.com.ar

don't work:

google.com.au
google.de
google.as

[another anon]

i don't know if this is going to sound dumb or worthwhile but i changed my homepage from duckduckgo to startpage.com and everything seems fine. if i'm just being dumb feel free to ridicule or ignore at your leisure

thanks for the recommendation GµårÐïåñ

[Locutus]

in the last 24 hours some time

google search quit completely
search works in "safe mode" (a huge misnomer, they should change it to "dangerous mode")

for several months it's been
"Firefox blocked a redirection attempt..."

which Alt-A would fix, and the search results page would load
now ALT-A redirects the redirection and loads the following page

http://www.google.ca/&gbv=1&sei=TFmHT7K5L8_XiQLujbWmBQ
http://www.google.ca/&gbv=1&sei=UFuHT5yyB8aciAKMzuXMAg
http://www.google.ca/&gbv=1&sei=a1uHT7bEAubYiAKJltn7Ag
http://www.google.com/&gbv=1&sei=mVuHT8zQJdTViAKw4aTSAg
etc.

the string after &sei= is random / changes with every search attempt
even the same search query

I don't know if it's a NS problem or not (which is my reason for posting)
it's been reported several times on the google search support group by other users of NS

me thinks google is committing code abuse again

[orphan]

Just started working again... google must have toggled the evil boolean.

[GµårÐïåñ]

i don't know if this is going to sound dumb or worthwhile but i changed my homepage from duckduckgo to startpage.com and everything seems fine. if i'm just being dumb feel free to ridicule or ignore at your leisure

thanks for the recommendation GµårÐïåñ

Why would anyone ridicule? Actually the same friend who I referenced in my reply to you had discussed scroogle (advocated for long time actually) and recently when it broke he was discovering new recommendations and actually duckduckgo came up as well and recently he mentioned he liked startpage better or at least as much, so when you asked it was on the brain and I gave it to you. If you like it, you are most welcome and I don't see why anyone would ridicule? Its a place of collaboration, opinions might differ but the goal is always the same. Hope you have good luck with it.

[GµårÐïåñ]

Just started working again... google must have toggled the evil boolean.

That happens, not sure why but when I first noticed this (prior to this all becoming so public) I had emailed Giorgio because it happened to me and discussed it with him but when he couldn't reproduce it and it went away on my end, I figured maybe it was a glitch that went away. Then today (coincidentally with all these posts) it happened again on a different machine and I knew it had to be real. So I came to open a formal thread to see if anyone else was experiencing it to widen the debug pool and I saw this already going. It is a slippery son of a gun and I am not sure what it is exactly, I have been digging hard to find out EXACTLY what it is, but no luck yet. Not even sure its NS fault, or contributing to it or just Google screwing with NS users like they did with Scroogle, and just being a bully or there is a real bug. We'll see I guess. The power of wider range of debug data beyond just me, so we'll see.

[Giorgio Maone]

What I additionally gathered from reports which came by email and from my personal experience (I couldn't reproduce at all, even using a proxy and switching several local Google versions):

1. The problem is/was intermittent and/or locale related, and seems to be gone now.
2. The problem is/was not NoScript-specific: in facts, I had reports from user who tried on Opera with JavaScript disabled, and had the same problem
3. It probably was some kind of Google experiment, which they (temporarily?) backed off.

[cb]

Google is working again.

Giorgio’s findings appear spot on. With a clean profile and no cookies and with JS toggled off Google searches fail.

The next time this anomaly appears it may be useful to supply IPs as well as URLs in an attempt to reproduce.

[Tom T.]

i don't know if this is going to sound dumb or worthwhile but i changed my homepage from duckduckgo to startpage.com and everything seems fine. if i'm just being dumb feel free to ridicule or ignore at your leisure

thanks for the recommendation GµårÐïåñ

I've been happy enough with https://startpage.com that I started a thread in Forum Extras > Web Tech recommending it, and soliciting user feedback as to whether to continue to recommend it, or any issues.

Google is working again.
Giorgio’s findings appear spot on. With a clean profile and no cookies and with JS toggled off Google searches fail.
The next time this anomaly appears it may be useful to supply IPs as well as URLs in an attempt to reproduce.

You may want to try the above secure, privacy-aware search engine, rather than continue to be a guinea pig for Google's experiments.

If we *all* switch, maybe they'll get the message, and change their behavior?
If they don't, who cares, so long as we have better alternatives?

[GµårÐïåñ]

What I additionally gathered from reports which came by email and from my personal experience (I couldn't reproduce at all, even using a proxy and switching several local Google versions):

1. The problem is/was intermittent and/or locale related, and seems to be gone now.
2. The problem is/was not NoScript-specific: in facts, I had reports from user who tried on Opera with JavaScript disabled, and had the same problem
3. It probably was some kind of Google experiment, which they (temporarily?) backed off.

Thank you good sir, that's why I said for all we know is not NS and google is just screwing with people. I guess you confirmed it. Thanks.