Tor and Google Image search

Thu Aug 17 14:39:47 UTC 2006

Brian C wrote:

> Shatadal wrote:
> > I think I should have been clearer. When I do a search for a term, say
> > "tor" I get the search results page with all the hits, but the thumbnail
> > images which should be present in the results page are not there and
> > instead there are the broken image links. If I click on such a link then
> > I am taken to the next page where on the top there is the thumbnail
> > image and below that is the original page (context) where the image is
> > found.
> > 
> > It is only in the search results page do I see the broken image links
> > and not the thumbnails.
> > 
> > Thanks.
> 
> Perhaps I should have been clearer too, but I used tor to do a couple
> Google image searches and the search results pages had all the
> appropriate image thumbnails that you apparently are not getting. I used
> tor on Debian to do these searches. That is to say, there's nothing
> wrong with tor and Google image searching generally. Rather, there must
> be something not quite right at your end, which could merely be network
> congestion.

I doubt it has anything to do with congestion, but there's certainly
something odd happening. I'd wager it has nothing to do with Tor
either so it's probably off topic. But here's my input anyway. Maybe
it will lead to a quick resolve. ;)

I see the exact same thing Brian sees using Tor/Privoxy with Opera 9.01
or Firefox 1.5.0.4, but Konqueror 3.4.2 displays the thumbnails just
fine. That's a Fedora box with yesterday's Tor Alpha-CVS and Privoxy
3.0.3.

My first guess was referrer logging, but I puttered with that setting
in Firefox and Opera with no consequence. It wouldn't explain why it
works naked but not with Tor, but differs across browsers. 

There's some differences in the HTTP headers among the three browsers.
Perhaps someone will spot something Privoxy would "adjust" in one case,
but not the others?? Here's what I see, including some of the actual
HTML because it's apparently relevant but I don't immediately see
what's triggering the differences...

[Firefox]
GET http://images.google.com/images?q=cow&hl=en&btnG=Search+Images HTTP/1.1
Host: images.google.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 600
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://images.google.com/
Cookie: PREF=ID=c7a469c3acb40a92:TM=1155822064:LM=1155822064:S=zgdYTWyuienUMwUH
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Set-Cookie: PREF=ID=88c065b5ae6c8432:TM=1155822600:LM=1155822600:S=WbJ-1DcOK3FvBq8P; path=/; domain=.google.com
Server: GWS/2.1
Transfer-Encoding: identity
Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2006 13:50:00 GMT
Connection: close
<html><head><script>function PrivoxyWindowOpen(){return(null);}</script><meta HTTP-EQUIV="content-type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=UTF-8"><title>cow - Google Image Search</title><style><!-- [...]

[Opera]
GET http://images.google.com/images?q=cow&hl=en&btnG=Search+Images HTTP/1.0
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; X11; Linux i686; en) Opera 9.01
Host: images.google.com
Accept: text/html, application/xml;q=0.9, application/xhtml+xml, image/png, image/jpeg, image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, */*;q=0.1
Accept-Language: en
Accept-Charset: iso-8859-1, utf-8, utf-16, *;q=0.1
Accept-Encoding: deflate, gzip, x-gzip, identity, *;q=0
Referer: http://images.google.com/
Proxy-Connection: close
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Set-Cookie: PREF=ID=3882b8fa871dc3b6:TM=1155823341:LM=1155823341:S=t5v2e-p8h-qfgy-7; path=/; domain=.google.com
Server: GWS/2.1
Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2006 14:02:21 GMT
Connection: close
<html><head><script>function PrivoxyWindowOpen(){return(null);}</script><meta HTTP-EQUIV="content-type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=UTF-8"><title>cow - Google Image Search</title><style><!--

[Konqueror]
GET /images?q=cow&ie=ISO-8859-1&hl=en&btnG=Search+Images HTTP/1.1
Referer: http://images.google.com/
Accept: text/html, image/jpeg, image/png, text/*, image/*, */*
Accept-Charset: utf-8, utf-8;q=0.5, *;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en
Host: images.google.com
Cookie: PREF=ID=fad0c5458582abb2:TM=1124647378:LM=1124647378:S=GwnPU8AXzT6zA69M
Connection: close
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html
Server: GWS/2.1
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2006 13:54:55 GMT
1483
<html><head><meta HTTP-EQUIV="content-type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"><title>cow - Google Image Search</title><style><!--
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