There appears to be a bug with Google+ that’s sometimes causing the wrong URLs to appear when sharing pages.
At first, I thought this was something happening just with me as an odd glitch. I was on Google+ today, entered a URL I wanted to share, and the wrong page title and description came up. I started over, and the problem went away.
Then Matt McGee, our executive news editor, found a similar issue happening:
See how the headline of the story is different than what he’s sharing. Not only is the headline not correct, but sharing from that article actually caused Google+ to try and share a completely different article.
We started looking to see if it was a problem on our end, but then I came across this being shared from another site in my own Google+ feed:
See how the headline is about “Help Desk Software” and doesn’t look properly formatted? If you click on the link, you get taken to a completely different story at VentureBeat, about Disney buying LucasArts as part of the Lucasfilm deal.
Looking around on Google+, I couldn’t see many others reporting the issue so far (AJ Kohn is one of the few), so it seems sporadic rather than widespread. But we’re checking with Google on it and will update, when we know more.
Postscript (Oct. 31): Google confirms this was a bug that’s now been fixed.
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