Google search referrer is not passed in the request body in iOS 6
Ryan Jones noted that the Google Search referrer is not transmitted in the body of the request when users use Google Search on iOS 6 (the latest version of Apple’s mobile OS).
I checked this fact and tried to search on my iPhone and iPad with iOS 6 on board - clicked on the link in the results, and indeed, the referral link was not transmitted in the request body. In short, this means that a click on a link is counted not as a transition from another site, but as a direct visit to the site.
An example of a request when clicking on a link in Google results from my iPhone 5 with iOS 6:
The same click on the same link, only in iOS 5:
As you can see, in this example, the referrer shows that you came to this page from the Google search engine. I also added a GET request to this example to show that I did not use Google SSL.
I decided to test how iOS 6 behaves with Bing, but the referrer is preserved:
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Whatever it is, I suspect that this is a bug on the Google side.
I checked this fact and tried to search on my iPhone and iPad with iOS 6 on board - clicked on the link in the results, and indeed, the referral link was not transmitted in the request body. In short, this means that a click on a link is counted not as a transition from another site, but as a direct visit to the site.
An example of a request when clicking on a link in Google results from my iPhone 5 with iOS 6:
www.rustybrick.com 142.54.83.140 – - [27/Sep/2012:09:36:28 -0400] “GET / HTTP/1.1″ 200 4386 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A405 Safari/8536.25″ The same click on the same link, only in iOS 5:
www.rustybrick.com 142.54.83.140 – - [27/Sep/2012:09:37:06 -0400] “GET / HTTP/1.1″ 200 4386 “http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCcQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rustybrick.com %2F&rct=j&q=rustybrick&ei=eVZkUP_-HMa_0QGjgYH4AQ&usg=AFQjCNHDkFv2w5fqS9Doczm4LbK4o6QQfg” “Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_1_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9B206 Safari/7534.48.3″ As you can see, in this example, the referrer shows that you came to this page from the Google search engine. I also added a GET request to this example to show that I did not use Google SSL.
I decided to test how iOS 6 behaves with Bing, but the referrer is preserved:
www.rustybrick.com 142.54.83.140 – - [27/Sep/2012:09:45:37 -0400] “GET / HTTP/1.1″ 200 4386 “http://m.bing.com/search?q=rustybrick&qs=n&mid=10006&FORM=BLXBSS&btsrc=internal&sc=3-10&cbt=1348753533365″ “Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A405 Safari/8536.25″ ')
Whatever it is, I suspect that this is a bug on the Google side.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/152549/
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