
Turning off Google search results indirection - happyman
http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/22291/turning-off-google-search-results-indirection
======
RexRollman
Google, in tiny incremental steps, are slowly destroying what I loved about
their search engine when I first started using it. So sad.

~~~
stock_toaster
For me they are not just slowly killing their search, but they are
incrementally distancing me from nearly all of their offerings. They are
moving in an aesthetic direction that I feel is both less usable and that I
find I enjoy using less. This has resulted in an increased 'friction' for me,
and thus I have been putting more effort into searching and trying
alternatives for various google services. I used to think of Google like my
own personal librarian for the internet. Now less so.

It brings to mind the old adages about being your own worst enemy/competition.
For me, Google is certainly losing out to my memory of an older version of
itself.

Perhaps I am no longer in their target demographic. Maybe I have just hit some
age threshold where certain things about myself have changed and my own
perceptions of what I want have shifted subtly as well. I imagine Google has
been doing quite well for itself, and would continue to do so even without me
as a user. ;)

~~~
kaybe
What are you using for search? I have yet to find a viable alternative; that
or my search-fu ist just google-fu and I have to adapt better.

~~~
stock_toaster
I have been using duckduckgo, but I do admit that when the results are not
what I am looking for, I try the "!g" to get google results. I find myself
doing that most often for extremely vague searches, or highly technical ones.

More recently the google results have not been much better than the duckduckgo
ones, without having to resort to quoting everything or further changing the
search terms.

~~~
kaybe
Thanks, I'll try that.

------
_delirium
This often (seemingly randomly) breaks the 'back' button for me as well: if I
hit back, it takes me back _to the redirect URL_ , which then redirects me
again. I have to hit back twice quickly, or choose something further back from
the history. I'm even using Google's own browser!

~~~
cytzol
I've never had the broken back button behaviour, but often, when a site is
down, the indirection page replaces whatever I was looking at with a blank
screen while the real site tries to load. For a technology that's meant to be
completely invisible, it doesn't do a great job of hiding itself.

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ck2
I remember the good old days when google hid this behavior.

They allowed the link to be direct and just attached an onclick handler that
loaded an image url to their tracker.

Maybe too many people like me are disabling javascript on Google services
(when you rarely can anymore).

~~~
nerfhammer
You could still handle it so that non-javascript clients got the href=redirect
and javascript users got the real href value and kept the redirect in the
onclick handler.

For whatever reason they seem to be doing the opposite

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eddieplan9
I switched away from Google on my iPad and iPhone particularly because of this
reason. The redirection sometimes can incur unbearable latency - with no
feedback whatsoever - after I click on the result I want. Mobile internet has
(much) longer latency, and every extra one level of redirection hurts badly.

~~~
baddox
I've noticed that, but it never occurred to me that this might be the cause.
Which browser do you use on those devices?

~~~
eddieplan9
I use mobile Safari.

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latch
I understand that the question is quite specific, but it seems to me that if
you have these types of concerns then duckduckgo really ought to be your
default search engine. I personally don't use it, but every day I'm more and
more tempted to.

~~~
fl3tch
I do searches for a lot of obscure stuff that only Google seems capable of
finding right now (well, I haven't used Bing much, but I've been comparing the
Google results to DDG, because people keep talking about it).

Here's an example. I remember reading a few months ago about how to do a
hexdump on /dev/urandom to create a Matrix-style scroll, and to "look busy in
front of your boss". So I did a Google search for "look busy with
/dev/urandom" and sure enough the blog post I was looking for is the first
result:

[http://jeromenicholas.blogspot.com/2011/03/look-busy-when-
yo...](http://jeromenicholas.blogspot.com/2011/03/look-busy-when-your-boss-
comes-around.html)

Now, I don't know if it's just the first result for me (I'd like to hear what
others get), but that post doesn't come up in the first 50 results on DDG,
using the same search string. Whether Google's algorithms are better overall
or they have been trained better by me after years of searching, the results
for obscure searches are simply better 95% of the time.

Of course, there are still the 5% of searches that end in frustration.
Example: there's an email product called Prayer. That's all I'm going to tell
you. Go ahead, try to find it. The correct result is #1 for me right now, but
that may be because I clicked through dozens of results before I found the
right one. It wasn't on the front page the first time I searched for it.

~~~
pilooch
We build a meta search open source layer called Seeks. We do naturally get to
compare Bing, Google and Blekko on a daily basis. Bing (and thus bot ddg and
Blekko that rely on it) lies behind for semi obscur queries. You can test by
yourself on any Seeks instance such as seeks.fr.

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shimon_e
I wish they gave an option to turn this off or at least they would disable it
in China.

Google has a lot of connectivity issues to China. Having the link be
redirected makes using Google a lot more unbearable as the connection hangs
like 50% of the time.

~~~
jimrandomh
If you're using Google Chrome 15 or earlier, then what you're seeing is a
problem with SPDY that was fixed in Chrome 16. But it's considered the
unstable version, so the auto-updater doesn't go that far.

~~~
shimon_e
I'm on Chrome 16 and it happens in other browsers.

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mrb
One solution is to use a competing search engine that does _not_ use indirect
links. Google started doing so somewhere in 2011, and this was enough of a
reason to make me switch over to bing.com

~~~
ot
Looks like Bing fires an AJAX call on the onmousedown, instead of rewriting
the URL.

What are the benefits of the two solutions, given that both rely on
Javascript? Maybe an AJAX call could be cancelled when browser follows the
link?

P.S. I believe Google has been doing rewriting since long before 2011, IIRC.

~~~
saurik
As mentioned in the article, Google's solution causes an inability to "right
click"->"copy link address"; it also makes going to the result by clicking on
it much slower (as you must synchronously go through Google's servers, causing
multiple packet round trips).

~~~
ot
Yes I understand that, I was wondering if Google's solution has any benefits.

Otherwise the onmousedown solution (which Google abandoned) would be strictly
superior.

~~~
saurik
Google's method does not, in fact, require JavaScript support (whether or not
Google chooses to only use it when JavaScript is available); that would be its
primary advantage. It also may be more reliable on some browsers (as it does
not rely on the browser keeping the previous page's scripts and requests
operating as you move to the next page).

Honestly, given the behavior of when Google chooses to deploy this feature, I
believe it to be an unintended bug. I believe that Google's intention with
these links is for them to work as normal: to be simple <a
href="[http://example.com/>](http://example.com/>), and to only change as you
click on them to go to the next page.

This would then explain why they require JavaScript: in order to pull off the
feat of having the link work correctly normally but only change as you click
it requires JavaScript; that then explains why they only serve this to clients
that have JavaScript.

If you check the link out: they actually are shipped from Google as simple
anchor tags. They they have an "onmousedown" that converts the link to a
Google indirect URL only as they are clicked. With the caveat that this makes
clicking the links really slow (due to the synchronous round trips to Google
that sometimes even fail due to SPDY), this would seem to be ideal behavior.

However, right-clicking the URL, or clicking on the link and dragging it, also
cause the link to be changed to the indirect URL. This could very well have
simply been an oversight: a mistake caused months (even years) after they
originally deployed this feature, and no one noticed or remembered it
shouldn't work like that.

(edit: Hacker News seriously won't let me put a closing " on the href= of my
<a> example tag... :(.)

~~~
jonknee
I would be shocked if it was a bug. Search is their main product and the
linked results are a huge part of it.

~~~
saurik
Well, under the assumption that it is a bug, it is one of those really subtle
ones that doesn't affect the vast majority of people (most people don't even
realize you can right click a link and copy it; even fewer care when the
result they copy/paste isn't the URL of the destination page as long as the
result works if someone else clicks on it).

Let me alternatively put it this way: for the same reason (that search is
their main product, that linked results are a huge part of it, and that
theoretically they care a lot to make the experience of that work really
well), I'd be shocked if this isn't a "bug"... the idea that this behavior
would be considered a feature is simply awkward.

That said, I now have managed to find a reference (linked above in this
thread) to someone from the Google Analytics team describing why the /url
feature was put into place, and it definitely sounds like something that
wasn't given /that/ much thought.

(Specifically, that they broke analytics tracking systems, including Google
Analytics, when they launched the AJAX search results pages: hash anchors are
not sent as part of a Referer:. It then sounds as if the Analytics team sent a
nastygram to the search team, who threw in a patch to make the Analytics team
stop yelling at them. ;P)

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jrockway
Is this really a privacy issue? You just requested a list of ten links from
Google; they know you're probably going to click one of them. This just allows
Google to figure out which result you thought was most relevant so the data
can be aggregated to give better results in the future. (And, it lets them
give you a warning if they think the site contains malware, which is a much
bigger threat to your privacy than Google.) Even if they didn't do this, you
can still be tracked by ads and analytics scripts on the page you visit. And,
you probably have software like a virus scanner or a malware scanner that
tracks what sites you visit and what files you download.

Ultimately, the whole business of searching the Internet involves collecting a
lot of information about what is useful and what is not. This is bad for
privacy but good for being able to find information. The tracking links seem
worrisome, but even without them, Google still knows a lot about you. (Does
anyone ever complain about how much their ISP knows about them? They know even
more than Google.)

Say what you want about Google and privacy, but I don't think this particular
feature is the one to complain about. That would be Analytics, which lets
Google track you when you aren't even on their site.

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pbreit
If Google is able to achieve what it needs with "onclick" or whatever and
provide direct links, it should definitely be doing so. The indirect links are
not user-friendly at all.

------
jmount
The re-writing is quite bad on Google sponsored links also: [http://www.win-
vector.com/blog/2009/07/should-your-mom-use-g...](http://www.win-
vector.com/blog/2009/07/should-your-mom-use-google-search/)

------
asto
Click the double arrow on the right of the search result, right click the
title that then appears and click copy link address. Not as straightforward as
before but not too bad.

~~~
olifante
sorry, that doesn't work for me with Chrome 16 on OS X Lion. I still get a
google indirect link.

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derekp7
I found a greasemonkey script called GoogleMonkeyR, which has an option to
disable this behavior. It also has a few other enhancements, such as bringing
back the Google cache links, numbering the results, and automatically adding
the next page of search results when you scroll to the bottom of the page.

Only problem I've had with this script is when I am entering something in the
Google search box, sometimes the cursor will take a jump to the left in the
middle of typing. It seems to be a weird interaction between this particular
user script and Google's search prediction feature.

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tiddchristopher
I've had a problem on my system (Firefox 4.0-9.1, Windows 7), where upon
clicking a result link, the search results page refreshes. Nothing else
happens. I can't get to individual results without middle clicking to open
them in a new tab. This has been happening since Google Instant came out. Does
anyone know what could be going on?

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huhtenberg
Any theories as to why Google decided to put the indirection in place? Too
many NoScript users? A patent pressure?

------
elnerdo
I have never experienced this behavior in google, but would be very annoyed if
I had.

My question is: Why haven't I ever experienced this? I use firefox with
adblock (with a very limited filter - nothing on google is blocked) and
noscript (nothing on google is blocked).

My other addons have no reason to alter google's search page.

~~~
perlgeek
noscript is the key; the HTML of the search result pages contain the direct
links, and a javascript piece that is loaded later on adds the tracker URL.

~~~
elnerdo
But noscript says that it's not blocking anything on my search results pages.
Does google detect my addons and remove the redirects if I _might_ be blocking
them?

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devs1010
Yeah I found this annoying as I've written some google scrapers, I ended up
having to use a library that supports javascript to be able to click the link
and then pull the url off the site directly, oh well, a lot of sites do this
so its a useful thing to know how to get around.

~~~
fooandbarify
Wouldn't it be easier/faster to just parse the desired URL from the link?

------
xtacy
Interestingly, this allows Google to measure the performance of a website from
_users' perspective_ by simply measuring the time it takes for a redirect.

That information can be very helpful to see how the web works for everyone.

~~~
ot
I'm quite skeptical they can do this with a redirect. How would it work?

~~~
eddieplan9
I am sure it doesn't.

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obilgic
Google does that to protect user's privacy. Search url may have private
information about user. Facebook does the same thing. So webmasters can not
track who clicked the url

------
Ind007
On positive side

If the site is infected ...Google shows the warning message and it doesn't do
the redirection. Saves the users from infected site.

------
fmx
I tried the Chrome extension and it seems to have no effect for me - the URL
is the same.

~~~
stan_rogers
You're probably in the wrong country (as I am). The script checks to see if
(asterisk)google.co(asterisk) is monkeying with the links and stops it. If
your local version on Google isn't google.com or google.co.(something) -- in
my case, it's www.google.ca -- then it allows the behaviour. You need to alter
the script to work for your locale.

------
eps
A bookmarklet version would've been awesome.

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machinarium
I thought it was for Web History?

------
WayneDB
Here is what I use:

"Google Tracking B-Gone" userscript -
<http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/47300>

as well as "Restore the Google Cached Link" -
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nhihjhedaljdlpkcpf...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nhihjhedaljdlpkcpfbplafgfkcijobc)

(There's also scroogle.org which scrapes google to get results, but doesn't
provide cached links. SCRATCH that. Scroogle doesn't work well at all.)

~~~
muyuu
Cheers, works on Chrome as well.

Link to source as it's simple and clear enough:
<http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/47300>

