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I was just browsing at some products on Amazon, without being logged in to Amazon, and then I noticed at the bottom the 'Recent Searches' box - which showed searches I had made from Google and had never clicked through to Amazon for.

Can someone explain this to me? Why is Amazon tracking my searches like this?

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4 Answers

up vote 5 down vote

Do you any extensions (FasterFox for example) or plugins installed that could be pre-fetching the links on the google search page, this would cause what you're observing as the browser (along with your amazon cookies) would still be hitting those pages.

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Interesting idea - not that I know of, but I just did a quick try without any extensions enabled and the history didn't seem to come up, so I think you are onto something. One of my extensions must be leaking my searches. – tobeannounced Jul 20 '10 at 22:33
up vote 4 down vote

If you have the Invisible Hand extension installed, this information can be leaked. See http://www.cnet.com/8301-31361_1-20004265-254.html

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up vote 0 down vote

Amazon does often have an advert bar at the bottom of some of it's pages, including the front page (not sure if it matters if you're a logged in user or not, but I don't always see the advert).

It could just be a Google ad in a standard ad bar at the bottom of the page, and nothing to do with Amazon at all.

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Thanks for the suggestion, but it wasn't an ad. It redirects to a 'view and manage your history' page. – tobeannounced Jul 20 '10 at 22:34
up vote 0 down vote

This is a lot less complex then you are thinking.

Whenever you click a link in your browser, the new web page is sent the URL (e.g. http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=http+refarer) of the page you clicked the link on.

Amazon is just making use of this and has been programmed to understand Google URLs as so many people come to Amazon from a Google search.

(Most browsers will let you turn this off, but that is a question to ask on SuperUser)

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Sorry, but it is not this - I mentioned in my question: 'which showed searches I had made from Google and had never clicked through to Amazon for.' So there were queries shown that I had made on Google and Amazon never even appeared in the search results for that were shown on Amazon to me. – tobeannounced Jul 21 '10 at 9:48

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