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Comment by oneloop | Hacker News Reader

It's an extra redirect. It's an incremental deterioration of user experience, the first of many to come under the vc drum beat.

I was positively aware that they weren't doing it and noticed about an hour ago that they started doing it. If I noticed this change I'm sure that many other people noticed and many more are being subconsciously annoyed.

Thin ice Reddit, thin ice.

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I'm showing my age here but I remember when Google started doing it. It still annoys me because I can't Right Click->Copy Link and get a proper url for the link.

The way google does it is really sneaky, they show you the url when you hover over it but copy the URL and it is something unusable.

Even more annoying when the destination url is a PDF which you now can't copy the link to but only download.

FWIW, startpage (like scroogle.org before it) re-enables the behavior that is so familiar to most web-knowledgeable people. Startpage is just a Google proxy.

I've been thinking it might be interesting to allow for easy hosting of Google proxies, like a one-click install on digitalocean that could be shared among a group of friends (~100 users at most).

Interesting: it looks to switch out the value for the href on mouse down...

Reddit does the same thing.

I don't understand why they do it this way. If they're using javascript to replace the value anyway, why not just leave the value alone, and capture the data they want behind the scenes with javascript? What does running the traffic through a redirect get them that javascript itself cannot?

well, i guess if the click triggers a page reload, the onclick-async event won't fire (or at least complete).

Do they still bother to do this in Chrome, even though Chrome supports the <a> ping attribute that obviates the need for it (and which was presumably added to Chrome exactly for Google Search's own use-case)?

I don't know, I don't use Chrome.

> even though Chrome supports the <a> ping attribute that obviates the need for it (and which was presumably added to Chrome exactly for Google Search's own use-case)?

And that's one reason why I don't use Chrome.

There is so much wrong with a company adding features to their browser in order to facilitate special cases for their own website.

> There is so much wrong with a company adding features to their browser in order to facilitate special cases for their own website.

Isn't <a> ping good for the end user? Unless you disagree with any ability to track outbound clicks - in which case we can politely agree to disagree.

Even if you disagree with the ability to track outbound clicks, ping would be good as if it becomes the main way of tracking clicks you'd be able to stop tracking by turning it off. When people do tracking by rewriting links server-side, on the other hand, you don't have an easy out.

I don't see this as a special case at all - a substantial proportion of link shortener usage, for example, is not for link shortening, but because most of them offer analytics.

The url that you copy is not unusable, it's a redirect url.

But that does make it unusable for anything but directly posting it into the address field of your own browser window.

Which means you end up having to open the URL first yourself just to copy and share it. And that doesn't even always work, since URLs triggering downloads don't update the URL in the address field (at least in Firefox).

Lets try.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

I'm sharing it with you. Is this unusable? Did you not get to the news article I was sharing with you by clicking on the link? So what's your point?

It's unusable. Before I clicked the link I couldn't tell if it was going to take me to chicagotribune.com (it does) or go*tse.cx.

"before you clicked" the link you haven't used it.

I'd argue that link user experience starts before you actually click a link. Maybe when you're deciding whether or not to click?

Same reason that URL shorteners are bad UX. Source (creator of Delicious): http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners

I'd argue that the vast majority of users have no idea what you're talking about.

That's my problem. I cannot in good faith give this kind of link to my friends.

If you are not logged in to Google, you get clean links. It's ironic that they treat less engaged users preferably.

The redirect links are fairly easy to trim. The real URL is at the end. So in the worst case, just snip it out.

I'm sure there are browser extensions that will do it for you.

  The real URL is at the end. So in the worst case,
  just snip it out.

I hope you remember all your character URL-encodings so you can snip out http%3A%2F%2Fciteseerx.ist.psu.edu%2Fviewdoc%2Fdownload%3Fdoi%3D10.1.1.54.3597%26rep%3Drep1%26type%3Dpdf right.

It's just hexadecimal ASCII. This is within our capabilities.

We can rebuild him. We have the technology.

> If you are not logged in to Google, you get clean links. It's ironic that they treat less engaged users preferably.

No you don't. They start out clean, but when you click or right click on the link, it changes.

It had been a long time since I checked. I don't use Google often.

But I just checked again, and you're partially correct. Some but not all links are replaced with the redirect on click or right click. If you browse with JavaScript disabled, some links are prepopulated as redirects, and others are not.

Google is a moving target.

Use DuckDuckGo [0] and you would get the proper URL for the link.

https://duckduckgo.com/

https://ddg.gg (short URL)

[0] the search engine that doesn't track you

Incorrect. I just tried it right now. duckduckgo has the same redirect behaviour as Google.To test this, middle-click a search result, ie open the link in a new tab.

edit: i can't find a way to disable this behaviour in the settings either.

edit 2 : Strange. It doesn't seem to be doing it now. I could sworn i have seen it use redirect links on multiple occassions.

Read this on Reddit. Haven't tried as I'm on mobile:

"You can circumvent that by right clicking and holding elsewhere then moving the mouse to the link, releasing and then copying."

User: gasdoves

Unsurprisingly, and just like with their affiliate link set up, they did it poorly. You can track links with a tiny bit of js and no redirect.

Although at their scale, I think things are very very different.

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