Can Search Engines index standalone URLs with long long alphanumeric characters in it? [closed]

Question

There's a web application designed by Freshdesk to track customer support requests. Ironically the application seems to have a feature to create an Internet Public URL for the support request whereby the customers can get to see the progress of their support request by clicking a link without any access control in place.

What this means is the details (Including any confidential personal information) you shared with the company in question thru that support requests are now accessible over the internet as a public URL.

The URL is in the form of domainname/path1/path2/long alphanumeric list of characters something like

http://www.domain.com/path1/path2/6dget35wtsy3738sswfsgdtTyTr4Ew3qyB8UjnhgT541qtG7Y6

Above is just a sample. Imagine this is a public URL but not linked thru any of the pages on www.domain.com. In order for users to access it, they need to have the exact URL with them.

Now my question is would search engines like Google be able to trace such URLs and index them in their search index pages?

If so it's a loss of confidentiality as the data that I shared with the company while opening a support request is now indexed by search engines.

Answer 1

No, search engines do not try to generate all possible URLs in case they find something there. If there is absolutely no link anywhere to a page, and no mention of it in the site's "sitemap", then it will not be indexed.

Google itself relies on this when users share Google Documents accessible to "anyone with a link". Obviously it would be bad for Google Documents reputation if such links ended up in search engine index on their own.

A relevant discussion is How unlikely is it that a Google Doc link is guessed?. Google Documents have a string of 44 random characters, the path you gave as an example has 50. It's not going to be guessed.