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Comment by alexf95 | Hacker News Reader

Can someone further explain "ClearURLs has made it to its mission to prevent tracking via URLs and that's how Google makes money"?

How exactly does the tracking via URLs work for Google?

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If you search in Google, the links in the results don't directly link to the result page but through a Google redirect. Really annoying if you want to copy/paste a result without visiting. CleanURL fixes this. So that might be what referred here.

Oh I see what you are saying thanks.

And more than really annoying if you want to share the link to a pdf with someone else.

I use NeatURL where description says:

Before:

http www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ioquake3-Auto-Updater&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Phoronix+(Phoronix)

After:

http www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ioquake3-Auto-Updater

It removed unnecessary, known tracking code from URL before visiting the URL so origin of click isn't known to advertisers and trackers.

For some websites, I've discovered that setting utm_medium let me read their paywalled articles.

So, they're not always useless ;)

Combine ClearURLs with Bypass Paywalls Clean, and you get the best of both worlds:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypass-paywal...

https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clea...

What's the difference between the normal version and the Clean version? The project doesn't say.

The Clean version is updated more frequently, has some extra features, and does not use Google Analytics:

https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clea...

Bypass Paywalls Clean releases: https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clea...

Bypass Paywalls releases: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/release...

Currently, the Clean version has 13,750 users while the original version has 9,864 users on addons.mozilla.org, so the fork might turn out to be more popular.

https://github.com/ClearURLs/Addon/blob/master/README.md

Hmm, intresting. Didn't think it would be basically "everywhere". Understandable though that i got disabled by Google.

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