I don’t think google should be held responsible for “breaking” this. It was crazy that one website got to see what i was doing on a second completely unrelated website.
Yep. There was all kinds of data a user could enter into Google search and unknowingly share with a search result site. Sucks for "SEOs", but great for users.
Used to be you'd look at your server logs and see referrer headers of google.com/?q=search+terms
Then they broke that (deliberately, well before cross origin header concerns were a thing) so you'd have to sign up for their webmaster tools.