Google is fully capable of providing excellent results. Today they'd rather please governments, media cartels, and biased employees. Google can get away with this because they aren't hurting for money. Search quality is no longer a priority. Google will treat you like a horse with blinders, or like a small child. Google would rather you not decide things for yourself.
Duckduckgo and Bing are decent. Both may seem wonderful if you now try them, but really you've just been getting accustomed to declining quality from Google.
When I tap just on or below the underline, it eats it. Then if I try to move the mouse away and back to the exact same position, the underline doesn't show up (and the hand cursor is the default mouse). To be clear the mouse is at the same position I clicked on before (where it had the hand+underline). Maybe a Chrome bug?
Trying to open in a new tab, you can end up selecting text rather than triggering the context menu.
When you click within a few vertical pixels of the underline, for click targets that are multiline where only the first line gets the underline, the click gets eaten 100% of the time. I'm sure there are other cases but that's the most obvious since the google search results are formatted like that.
line 1 - title
line 2 - url
UPDATE: it's not eaten. it alternately toggles the underline on or off.
Also, you have to click above the green URL text for the click to toggle the underline. If you click past the edge of the URL text (under the 'le' in the example above), the click works correctly.
And they do it on the onClick event, so you are mislead to believe that the link is clean (as show on your status bar on link mouse over, until the very last second)
And they do that on GMail, calendar, and even on mobile apps such as google voice and hangouts. (i.e. if you long press and copy, it is a clean url, if you touch the link, it opens a tracking redirect on the browser --which chrome hides. But you should be using firefox on android as well)
Firefox (desktop and mobile) and Chorme (only desktop because google don't want you installing adblockers on their browsers) have an extension called "Skip Redirect" that works-around this problem.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/stat...
If you are using a browser that prevents status bar fooling, you will be able to copy the original link and middle click to avoid tracking. If your browser allows it, then everything will include tracking.
[mouth open emoji]
Smacking my head that I never thought to look for such an extension. Thanks!
Thanks for mentioning that. Google is the the one site where I want it to always work, but it seems the extension has a limitation with Google's links.
At least with Firefox under Windows 7, if you click on a Google link, it won't skip the redirect. It does skip the redirect if you open the link in a new tab, or if you copy the link location, then paste and go from the address bar. Has anyone else noticed this? Maybe I need to tell the author of the extension.
Think of search as "given this search query, which of the trillions of webpages on the internet will the user end up visiting?".
By looking at historic answers to that question from other users, they can present links to web pages which are very likely to answer the query for you too.
That is the reason smaller search engines (Bing), and privacy search engines (DDG), will never get as good as Google. Without data to answer the above question, they will never get as good results.
Depending on which Google version loads, sometimes the green URL displayed under the blue title is also clickable. You expect hyperlinks on the WWW to be blue and underlined, so when some green text with no underline is also a link, it can be misleading.
Keep an eye out for the cursor changing to a hand, which sounds like a piece of advice from the 1990's!
I've got a couple common extensions running between the two, with uBlock Origin being my most likely culprit if it's an extension thing, but it's definitely annoying! Don't know why it's going on.
(i'm on mojave and latest chrome)
But dragging or middle click to a new tab is following the link. This looks a lot an issue between the numerous javascript trackers and my browser ad blocker. But no.
so my working theory is that drag sensitivity has increased. so a sloppy 1 pixel click-drag used to be a click but now it’s an imperceptible drag. i haven’t got up the motivation yet to audit a mouse event log.
Glad it's not just me, i thought my mouse was being buggy
OSX Mojave, Latest Chrome