From: "Daniel S. Riley" <dsr@lns598.lns.cornell.edu>
Date: Mon, 25 Dec 1995 01:05:14 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: [Noise] Re: Alta Vista caches queries
In-Reply-To: <199512220220.DAA27203@utopia.hacktic.nl>
Message-ID: <9512241608.AA07620@lns100.lns.cornell.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



In article <199512220220.DAA27203@utopia.hacktic.nl>
nobody@REPLAY.COM (Anonymous) writes:
nobody> I just stopped in on Digital's new Alta Vista page, and was
nobody> surprised to find that the query field was filled in--with a
nobody> search I ran 3 or 4 days ago.

The forms interface for Alta Vista uses METHOD="GET", which means the
parameters for the query are encoded in the URL, not transmitted
separately as it would be for METHOD="POST".  For example, a search
for "cypherpunks" sends a request for the URL

http://www.altavista.digital.com\
/cgi-bin/query?what=web&q=cypherpunks&Submit.x=0&Submit.y=0&pg=q

If I bookmark that URL and return to it later, Alta Vista will rerun
the query just as it did the first time (btw, the first two hits from
that search are detweiler pages).  On several visits to

http://www.altavista.digital.com/

I see no evidence that they are caching queries, so I suspect you
cached the query yourself by bookmarking a search result.

Of course, this does not mean that one shouldn't have the usual
privacy concerns that apply to any WWW service...