{"id":1505,"date":"2025-07-11T02:54:52","date_gmt":"2025-07-11T00:54:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stuff.tamius.net\/sacred-texts\/?p=1505"},"modified":"2025-07-11T10:56:43","modified_gmt":"2025-07-11T08:56:43","slug":"so-thats-why-my-extensions-secret-message-appeared-in-google-search-results","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stuff.tamius.net\/sacred-texts\/2025\/07\/11\/so-thats-why-my-extensions-secret-message-appeared-in-google-search-results\/","title":{"rendered":"So that’s why [my extension’s secret message appeared in Google search results]."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Slovenski prevod tukaj<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This year hasn’t really been smooth sailing for my extension. I’ve had quite a few issues that \u2014 as is tradition \u2014 lots of people complained about in the reviews, while at the same time nobody really thought to … like, open an issue over on Github or even write me an e-mail or something? You don’t even need to stalk me to get it \u2014 it appears on the Chrome Web Store listing, and then also at least twice in the extension itself. If you don’t behave like an asshole, I’ll even be nice. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I swear \u2014 if people’s first instinct were to use a two-way medium of communication as opposed to going for the 1\/5 button that only ever goes one-way; if provided some of the most basic information <\/em>(such as: addon version (“latest” isn’t a valid answer) and the browser they’re using); and if people actually did the thing you ask of them instead of making things up … <\/em>Let’s just say that some problems would be fixed a lot faster, and some might even have not happened.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Whoops, went on a bit of a tangent. Where was I?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Right, Ultrawidify. To recap \u2014 back in January there were issues. In a bid to debug said issues, the extension started injecting invisible elements into every webpage that contained a video that a user visited. Invisible elements included an invisible “secret message” \u2014 and soon enough, that secret message started to appear in Google search results:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Extension’s invisible secret message appearing in search results.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

But how could that be? This secret message only existed on the webpage if you visited said webpage with my addon enabled. This message only ever existed for real human users of my addon, therefore it should be impossible for search engines to pick it up. Yet there it was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Needless to say, I was confused<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Until yesterday, when ArsTechnica released an article describing how shady browser extensions secretly incorporated code that turned browsers of real users into web scrappers<\/a>. Long story short: we have a startup \u2014 Mellowtel \u2014 that came to extension developers with the following deal:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You, extension dev, receive:<\/strong> money
I, Mellowtel, receive:<\/strong> you put our web scrapper into your extension, so we can use your real users to scrape the web<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ironically, I was surprisingly on point when I said, in the previous blog post on this matter:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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So how does that happen? Currently, there\u2019s about two options that come to mind:<\/p>\n\n\n\n