Lukas
November 18, 2020, 1:53pm
12
Hi @progger ,
This is caused by the following:
Matomo uses this list for detecting search engines:
But as specified it only detects startpage if either the referrer contains a ?query=searchterm part of if the referrer is /do/asearch. As startpage does neither anymore, but uses a referrer policy to tell the browser to set the referrer to https://www.startpage.com/ Matomo doesn’t detect it.
I wrote down my thoughts about this in a new issue:
opened 01:57PM - 18 Nov 20 UTC
closed 02:49AM - 31 Dec 20 UTC
c: Usability
RFC
while this mostly affects https://github.com/matomo-org/searchengine-and-social-… list/ I think this should be changed in Matomo itself
reported in https://forum.matomo.org/t/search-engines-in-the-list-of-websites/37192/12?u=lukas
Matomo doesn't detect a lot of search engines anymore as the detection assumes that the referrer URL contains the search query specified in the search engine list. But hardly any search engine sends it anymore, so it doesn't work.
As a workaround it seems like the `hiddenkeyword` keyword was added to the yaml file to specify the URL that is used to do the redirect over and which will be then the referrer URL.
But as referrer policy and such things are now widespread, no one opens links via redirects anymore and this is again pointless.
One could fix this issue by adding
```yaml
hiddenkeyword:
- '/^$/'
- '/'
```
to every search engine in the list, but at this point the setting becomes useless and instead I think Matomo should instead handle every referrer URL like `https://www.startpage.com/` as a search engine independent on the exact URL or query parameters.