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"A 32-bit hash prefix like "ba7816bf" would represent the first eight characters of a 256-bit, 64-character SHA256 digest of a full URL." Is this done for 'pri
by legacynl 6y ago
"A 32-bit hash prefix like "ba7816bf" would represent the first eight characters of a 256-bit, 64-character SHA256 digest of a full URL."
Is this done for 'privacy'?
Pretty thinly veiled attempt, because they could easily create hashes for every url their crawlers come across, and do some statistical wizardry to try to find out which of the 1000 urls with that prefix you visited. Right?
- jaywalk 6y agoIt's as good as you can get without resorting to maintaining the database on the client.
- kccqzy 6y agoOf course it's done for privacy. If Google created hashes for every single URL it crawled, the hash prefixes that are downloaded by clients would be enormously large, wasting multi gigabytes for on-device storage of these hash prefixes.