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.