Chromebook filtering on mouse hover-over on search results - forward lookup filtering?

[timbo343]

We've not tested all sites though 2 of our sites are experiencing a strange issue when users are using Chromebooks both onsite and offsite.

 

This came about when we were told that performing a Google search for Soup Athens was blocking the search term because of reddit.com yet we never clicked on any of the search results to take us to reddit.com. We don't know if this is because of the Gemini AI which is shown first as part of the search results.

 

That evening I bought a Chromebook home and tested though couldn't replicate the issue, however I did notice that searching Soup Athens did show the Google searches however when I hovered the mouse over the reddit.com and yelp.com links and did not actually click into them, I was shown a block page. Would this suggest there is some kind of forward lookup filtering or something like that which the Chromebooks are looking at the page first, downloading any data for the page and then the Smoothwall Cloud filter is blocking it because it thinks the user has clicked on the search result.

 

 

[DrCheese]

Yes, Chrome 134+ prescans links. If you google something & the first few links go to banned pages, the search as a whole gets blocked.

 

You can turn it off by following the instructions here

 

https://kb.smoothwall.com/hc/en-us/articles/19066938031132-Cloud-Filter-issues-with-Chrome-v134

[timbo343]

Cheers - must have missed this considering Chrome is now at version 140.

 

Update - that's sorted the issue. Thank you.