This often (seemingly randomly) breaks the 'back' button for me as well: if I hit back, it takes me back <i>to the redirect URL</i>, 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!
I remember the good old days when google hid this behavior.<p>They allowed the link to be direct and just attached an onclick handler that loaded an image url to their tracker.<p>Maybe too many people like me are disabling javascript on Google services (when you rarely can anymore).
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.
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.
I wish they gave an option to turn this off or at least they would disable it in China.<p>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.
One solution is to use a competing search engine that does <i>not</i> 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
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.<p>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.)<p>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.
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.
The re-writing is quite bad on Google sponsored links also: <a href="http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2009/07/should-your-mom-use-google-search/" rel="nofollow">http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2009/07/should-your-mom-use-g...</a>
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.
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.<p>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.
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?
I have never experienced this behavior in google, but would be very annoyed if I had.<p>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).<p>My other addons have no reason to alter google's search page.
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.
Interestingly, this allows Google to measure the performance of a website from <i>users' perspective</i> by simply measuring the time it takes for a redirect.<p>That information can be very helpful to see how the web works for everyone.
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
Here is what I use:<p>"Google Tracking B-Gone" userscript -
<a href="http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/47300" rel="nofollow">http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/47300</a><p>as well as "Restore the Google Cached Link" - <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nhihjhedaljdlpkcpfbplafgfkcijobc" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nhihjhedaljdlpkcpf...</a><p>(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.)