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Google home page has spurious characters in address line. Why?

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I have recently rebooted my machine after getting some issues with it.I reset the home page to Google after hopefully fixing it. There is now an issue with the home page address:

https://www.google.co.uk/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=qZ7jVJfvLNCq8wf-jIDwCw&gws_rd=ssl - what are teh surious characters after Google.co.uk?

How can they be removed? I reset homepgae and search engines but nothing happened

Thank you Regards Simon

I have recently rebooted my machine after getting some issues with it.I reset the home page to Google after hopefully fixing it. There is now an issue with the home page address: https://www.google.co.uk/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=qZ7jVJfvLNCq8wf-jIDwCw&gws_rd=ssl - what are teh surious characters after Google.co.uk? How can they be removed? I reset homepgae and search engines but nothing happened Thank you Regards Simon

All Replies (8)

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Can you attach a screenshot?

  • Use a compressed image type like PNG or JPG to save the screenshot
  • Make sure that you do not exceed the maximum size of 1 MB

The McAfee SiteAdvisor extension has been reported to cause issues with text Chinese (CJK) characters appearing on tabs, so you can disable this extension until McAfee releases an update to address this issue.

See also these SUMO threads:

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Did you bookmark only google.co.uk? If I try that hostname, I get: https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl That stuff after ".uk/" refers to the page being encrypted, but I have no idea what the rest is in your link.

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Shax658 said

I have recently rebooted my machine after getting some issues with it.I reset the home page to Google after hopefully fixing it. There is now an issue with the home page address: https://www.google.co.uk/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=qZ7jVJfvLNCq8wf-jIDwCw&gws_rd=ssl - what are teh surious characters after Google.co.uk? How can they be removed? I reset homepgae and search engines but nothing happened Thank you Regards Simon

Here is home page screenshot.

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I have attached s ceen shot - showing the spurious characters. Further assistance would be appreciated

Thank you Simon

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I see no spurious characters in that screenshot. The text all looks normal to me. I have never seen an image like that on a Google page, though.

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I have never seen an image like that on a Google page

See:

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Hi Finitarry and Corel The spurious characyers are in teh web address line - Its normally justy Google.co.uk or Google.com

As for the image, Google vary itdepending on an anniversary or natabale date

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I see no spurious characters in the address line either. They all look normal, unless you refer to the fact that everything but the domain name and suffix is semitransparent. That is the default way Firefox displays addresses now (WHY?? - it is an awkward way to emphasize something). The strange-looking code is probably specifying the doodle you are using, in addition to specifying that the page is encrypted.