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One of my hobbies is looking at url strings with GET key/value pairs. Programmers must forget that they're visible to users. LinkedIn has a search workflow tha

One of my hobbies is looking at url strings with GET key/value pairs. Programmers must forget that they're visible to users. LinkedIn has a search workflow that shows "origin=TYPEAHEAD_ESCAPE_HATCH" which I've always found humorous.

thaumasiotes 6y ago
> Programmers must forget that they're visible to users. GET parameters aren't usually visible to users; with the deemphasis of the URL bar, you'd have to have an incredibly short URL for that to even be a possbility. Right now I'm looking at https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=23717577&goto=item%3Fi ....... That's one visible parameter. There's PLENTY OF SPACE for firefox to show the rest of the URL, but it won't; instead, a bunch of icons are unhelpfully crammed into the same horizontal layout. In the larger sense, where users can see the parameters if they intentionally look for them, despite the fact that they are normally invisible, POST parameters are just as visible.
- shostack 6y ago
  As a marketer, there's valuable competitive info that is sometimes inadvertently included in these around targeting, testing, etc.
- pwg 6y ago
  > That's one visible parameter. There's PLENTY OF SPACE for firefox to show the rest of the URL, but it won't; instead, a bunch of icons are unhelpfully crammed into the same horizontal layout. Right click on the "crammed" icon area, pick "customize", and then you can drag and drop the icons crammed into the space into another bar (or out of the UI entirely if they are icons for things you never use), which should then recover much of the lost space.
NickHoff 6y ago
Yeah I noticed that too. If you go to the profile page of someone who has the LinkedIn pro version and hover over the gold "in" symbol next to their name, it links to a URL containing upsellOrderOrigin=premium_badge_profile_upsell
- leephillips 6y ago
  That's pretty funny. It might as well say “sucker”.
SethKinast 6y ago
Haha I worked on that flow. It's the escape hatch because we didn't find what you were looking for in the typeahead, so we have to let you escape to the full SERP results page.
- robmiller 6y ago
  Admittedly, all because I don't want to ding the user that I viewed their profile, but the search results shows enough...

thaumasiotes 6y ago

> Programmers must forget that they're visible to users. GET parameters aren't usually visible to users; with the deemphasis of the URL bar, you'd have to have an incredibly short URL for that to even be a possbility. Right now I'm looking at https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=23717577&goto=item%3Fi ....... That's one visible parameter. There's PLENTY OF SPACE for firefox to show the rest of the URL, but it won't; instead, a bunch of icons are unhelpfully crammed into the same horizontal layout. In the larger sense, where users can see the parameters if they intentionally look for them, despite the fact that they are normally invisible, POST parameters are just as visible.

shostack 6y ago
As a marketer, there's valuable competitive info that is sometimes inadvertently included in these around targeting, testing, etc.
pwg 6y ago
> That's one visible parameter. There's PLENTY OF SPACE for firefox to show the rest of the URL, but it won't; instead, a bunch of icons are unhelpfully crammed into the same horizontal layout. Right click on the "crammed" icon area, pick "customize", and then you can drag and drop the icons crammed into the space into another bar (or out of the UI entirely if they are icons for things you never use), which should then recover much of the lost space.

NickHoff 6y ago

Yeah I noticed that too. If you go to the profile page of someone who has the LinkedIn pro version and hover over the gold "in" symbol next to their name, it links to a URL containing upsellOrderOrigin=premium_badge_profile_upsell

leephillips 6y ago
That's pretty funny. It might as well say “sucker”.

SethKinast 6y ago

Haha I worked on that flow. It's the escape hatch because we didn't find what you were looking for in the typeahead, so we have to let you escape to the full SERP results page.

robmiller 6y ago
Admittedly, all because I don't want to ding the user that I viewed their profile, but the search results shows enough...