Turning off Google search results indirection | Hacker News Reader

Turning off Google search results indirection

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152 pointshappyman85 comments

Google, in tiny incremental steps, are slowly destroying what I loved about their search engine when I first started using it. So sad.

For me they are not just slowly killing their search, but they are incrementally distancing me from nearly all of their offerings. They are moving in an aesthetic direction that I feel is both less usable and that I find I enjoy using less. This has resulted in an increased 'friction' for me, and thus I have been putting more effort into searching and trying alternatives for various google services. I used to think of Google like my own personal librarian for the internet. Now less so.

It brings to mind the old adages about being your own worst enemy/competition. For me, Google is certainly losing out to my memory of an older version of itself.

Perhaps I am no longer in their target demographic. Maybe I have just hit some age threshold where certain things about myself have changed and my own perceptions of what I want have shifted subtly as well. I imagine Google has been doing quite well for itself, and would continue to do so even without me as a user. ;)

I feel like they are trying to shove me haphazardly into a web OS, with all of the links to the various services, when the technology is not ready enough, and I don't want one anyway. They are just managing instead to annoy me with their new graphics interface, but maybe I am also not the target market.

What are you using for search? I have yet to find a viable alternative; that or my search-fu ist just google-fu and I have to adapt better.

I have been using duckduckgo, but I do admit that when the results are not what I am looking for, I try the "!g" to get google results. I find myself doing that most often for extremely vague searches, or highly technical ones.

More recently the google results have not been much better than the duckduckgo ones, without having to resort to quoting everything or further changing the search terms.

Thanks, I'll try that.

I'm usually a defender of how Google does things, but yea adding this indirection URL is something that has bothered me for quite some time. To me, it's just really sloppy code to be tracking things like this.

This often (seemingly randomly) breaks the 'back' button for me as well: if I hit back, it takes me back to the redirect URL, 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!

This really bothers me as well, but I was attributing it (perhaps erroneously) to my use of NoScript.

I'd prefer if it was an option you could disable somewhere in the settings.

I've never had the broken back button behaviour, but often, when a site is down, the indirection page replaces whatever I was looking at with a blank screen while the real site tries to load. For a technology that's meant to be completely invisible, it doesn't do a great job of hiding itself.

I remember the good old days when google hid this behavior.

They allowed the link to be direct and just attached an onclick handler that loaded an image url to their tracker.

Maybe too many people like me are disabling javascript on Google services (when you rarely can anymore).

TFA says this doesn't happen with JS disabled.

You could still handle it so that non-javascript clients got the href=redirect and javascript users got the real href value and kept the redirect in the onclick handler.

For whatever reason they seem to be doing the opposite

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've noticed that, but it never occurred to me that this might be the cause. Which browser do you use on those devices?

I use mobile Safari.

What have you started using instead? I really dislike all the versions of Safari for offering only Google/Bing/Yahoo.

I started using Yahoo instead. It has lots of problems and is not polished at all, but it does its job - searching and getting me to the result.

I do hope there will be more serious competition in mobile search field. Yahoo really should polish its mobile site. At least it should replace its blurry logo.

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 like ddg and find its results far more useful.

Really? In my experience the results are far less relevant. I really tried to use DuckDuckGo, because of the privacy advantages - even set it as my default search engine - but the results just aren't as good. It's also slower - noticeably slower. I very much hope they can improve to the point where they're on par with Google in terms of quality and speed, but they're not there yet.

TBH speed is the most important reason for keeping me on google, even though I know privacy should really take precedence.

Our speed varies by location right now but this is changing as we get servers in more locations around the world.

also you can't use it as a verb. Google this, google that. You can easily duckduckgo my contacts... nah, doesn't sound right :)

You can duck or quack it!

nobody will understand it in the search context :) everyone knows how to google, and nobody knows how to duck

"Search (for) it."

Most people are going to use Google, maybe Bing, maybe Bahoo!, and are barely aware of and would not use another search engine.

Those that do know about DDG will either use it or not.

Whenever I include a search link in an email (or HN thread) it's always a DDG link, except for those rare searches where I get nothing back from DDG. I think that's one of the best ways to promote DDG. Bonus, the DDG search links are unadulterated.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duck+duck+go

Firefox, Ubuntu plus whatever 2 or 3 way deal Google has with all that:

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&cp=6&gs_id=11&xhr=t...

Chromium, Ubuntu, plus whatever deal ...

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&cp=6&gs_id=m&xhr=t&...

I didn't ask for that, and I would have to clean that up before I pasted that google search into an email.

Opera etc:

http://www.google.com/search?q=uzbl#pq=philadelphia&hl=e...

And by the way, if you want to search google a little more anonymously, do it via DDG. In your search bar or on DDG's page, type in !g your search term. You'll be redirected to Google's search, and the URL will be relatively clean:

From ddg, !g duck duck go gives you:

https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=duck%20duck%...

I still didn't ask for the hl=en bit, but it's much better than the cascade of line noise that Google would otherwise give you.

Edit: minor wording.

In theory you can't use the trademarked word "google" as a verb.

I have no idea if Google is still trying to stop people doing this or not.

half the world uses the word "xerox" for a copy machine, "pampers" for diapers, and "jeep" for an offroader. So, google as verb is now completely natural

...and lawyers love people who use those words as verbs, because they get paid every time they write a letter to say that the verb is, in fact, a trademarked noun and could a different word be used, or the trademark be acknowledged?

Google used to (still does?) send cease and desist letters; and they've asked people to only use google-as-a-verb when people are actually talking about Google. Thus "I'll google it" when a person is using Bing is, according to Google, not on.

As my boss at Google always used to say: "Bing it!"

Thanks for giving it a go! We have improved a lot in the past year and contiune every day so I encourage you to try again in a few months if you are still inclined to do so. Result quality also of course varies by query and query type so each person can have pretty different overall experiences based upon ths types of things they regularly search.

I also encourage people to submit feedback with specific result issues.

Do you have an equivalent of Google Scholar? At least 75% of my searches recently have been through Scholar and I would love to find a useable replacement. On the other hand, most of the nasty problems on the front page aren't happening (yet) on Scholar.

No, not yet though you can get to scholar directly from ddg by doing !scholar search.

Yes, really. Its what Google used to be like - before every search term became a commercial opportunity to be exploited.

I switched to duckduckgo (ddg) earlier this year. For a while, I'd occasionally use google, but now I only do so out of curiosity to compare results. ddg has improved enormously since I've been using it. I highly recommend giving it a go.

I've always wondered if ddg's stated mission to respect privacy, etc. is in fact causing it to show worse results than Google...i.e., because Google tracks clicks, knows who from what region clicks on a link more often and ostensibly moves those results further up, don't they have better "signals" about what results to prioritize? It strikes me that ddg is handicapped in this regard as it ignores these signals that its competitors openly use.

Note: I frequent both ddg and google (more the latter as it's the default in my browser) but I've always wondered if ddg's results would be even better if the "ignored signals" were, well, not ignored.

User clicls are used to fit ranking functions. These functions typically depend on a number of signals that make their optimization otherwise intractable.

Dedicated machine learning algorithms take into account the click-bias due to the results initial position.

The main DDG limitation is that it doesn't really work well for non english resources.

Our 0-click is largely in English, but you should be able to type in non-English searches and get non-English results. If you change your region in the settings, it will also boost results from a particular language/region combo. You can also do this on a per-query basis by adding say r:uk to the end.

> Our 0-click is largely in English, but you should be able to type in non-English searches and get non-English results.

Yes, in fact the 0-click is the best part of DDG that's why it's a pity :) Thanks for the tips.

We are certainly aware of this issue :). On a related note we have a new translation platform for the interface. It is not the zero click yet but on the right track!

I use DDG as my main search engine and I'm a native Icelandic speaker. I search for Icelandic content every now and then and rarely have problems with DDG results.

The biggest difference stems, not from a limit on the language, but a simple limit of the number of search results (I have no idea whether it's the search algo, or the index that's smaller or some other reason).. Icelandic websites generally have fewer results so it's more common for me to see 'nothing here, try google' in DDG.

My only problem with DDG is page load speeds. Initial page load is slower, searches take a while, but my major problem is that even after the page loads, the results of the page aren't yet fully loaded.

We're working on all of these issues. Initial load has a lot to do with network location and we need more servers. The after-the-fact thing is by design so that some slower elements don't slow down the faster ones. We have a new design coming out that should lower the perception of things changing much though.

I do searches for a lot of obscure stuff that only Google seems capable of finding right now (well, I haven't used Bing much, but I've been comparing the Google results to DDG, because people keep talking about it).

Here's an example. I remember reading a few months ago about how to do a hexdump on /dev/urandom to create a Matrix-style scroll, and to "look busy in front of your boss". So I did a Google search for "look busy with /dev/urandom" and sure enough the blog post I was looking for is the first result:

http://jeromenicholas.blogspot.com/2011/03/look-busy-when-yo...

Now, I don't know if it's just the first result for me (I'd like to hear what others get), but that post doesn't come up in the first 50 results on DDG, using the same search string. Whether Google's algorithms are better overall or they have been trained better by me after years of searching, the results for obscure searches are simply better 95% of the time.

Of course, there are still the 5% of searches that end in frustration. Example: there's an email product called Prayer. That's all I'm going to tell you. Go ahead, try to find it. The correct result is #1 for me right now, but that may be because I clicked through dozens of results before I found the right one. It wasn't on the front page the first time I searched for it.

I get the same result on google and in duckduckgo it doesn't appear. I think it's also worth pointing out that "/dev/urandom" doesn't show bolded (as in "we found the string in this particular search result") until the 25th or so result. I don't know if duckduckgo just shows the bolding less often or that it just sorts its results very awkwardly.

We build a meta search open source layer called Seeks. We do naturally get to compare Bing, Google and Blekko on a daily basis. Bing (and thus bot ddg and Blekko that rely on it) lies behind for semi obscur queries. You can test by yourself on any Seeks instance such as seeks.fr.

I wish they gave an option to turn this off or at least they would disable it in China.

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.

It's not just China. It's a general problem with any high-latency link (for example satellite or mobile broadband.) These redirects easily added 2-3 seconds to the latency of retrieving a page when I was working over satellites at a remote retreat center. And that was as you say on a good day. Hanging connections were very common, I often had to do a hard refresh on various Google Apps to get them to stop the spinning wheel of death.

If you're using Google Chrome 15 or earlier, then what you're seeing is a problem with SPDY that was fixed in Chrome 16. But it's considered the unstable version, so the auto-updater doesn't go that far.

I'm on Chrome 16 and it happens in other browsers.

One solution is to use a competing search engine that does not 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

Looks like Bing fires an AJAX call on the onmousedown, instead of rewriting the URL.

What are the benefits of the two solutions, given that both rely on Javascript? Maybe an AJAX call could be cancelled when browser follows the link?

P.S. I believe Google has been doing rewriting since long before 2011, IIRC.

As mentioned in the article, Google's solution causes an inability to "right click"->"copy link address"; it also makes going to the result by clicking on it much slower (as you must synchronously go through Google's servers, causing multiple packet round trips).

Yes I understand that, I was wondering if Google's solution has any benefits.

Otherwise the onmousedown solution (which Google abandoned) would be strictly superior.

Google's method does not, in fact, require JavaScript support (whether or not Google chooses to only use it when JavaScript is available); that would be its primary advantage. It also may be more reliable on some browsers (as it does not rely on the browser keeping the previous page's scripts and requests operating as you move to the next page).

Honestly, given the behavior of when Google chooses to deploy this feature, I believe it to be an unintended bug. I believe that Google's intention with these links is for them to work as normal: to be simple <a href="http://example.com/>, and to only change as you click on them to go to the next page.

This would then explain why they require JavaScript: in order to pull off the feat of having the link work correctly normally but only change as you click it requires JavaScript; that then explains why they only serve this to clients that have JavaScript.

If you check the link out: they actually are shipped from Google as simple anchor tags. They they have an "onmousedown" that converts the link to a Google indirect URL only as they are clicked. With the caveat that this makes clicking the links really slow (due to the synchronous round trips to Google that sometimes even fail due to SPDY), this would seem to be ideal behavior.

However, right-clicking the URL, or clicking on the link and dragging it, also cause the link to be changed to the indirect URL. This could very well have simply been an oversight: a mistake caused months (even years) after they originally deployed this feature, and no one noticed or remembered it shouldn't work like that.

(edit: Hacker News seriously won't let me put a closing " on the href= of my <a> example tag... :(.)

I would be shocked if it was a bug. Search is their main product and the linked results are a huge part of it.

Well, under the assumption that it is a bug, it is one of those really subtle ones that doesn't affect the vast majority of people (most people don't even realize you can right click a link and copy it; even fewer care when the result they copy/paste isn't the URL of the destination page as long as the result works if someone else clicks on it).

Let me alternatively put it this way: for the same reason (that search is their main product, that linked results are a huge part of it, and that theoretically they care a lot to make the experience of that work really well), I'd be shocked if this isn't a "bug"... the idea that this behavior would be considered a feature is simply awkward.

That said, I now have managed to find a reference (linked above in this thread) to someone from the Google Analytics team describing why the /url feature was put into place, and it definitely sounds like something that wasn't given /that/ much thought.

(Specifically, that they broke analytics tracking systems, including Google Analytics, when they launched the AJAX search results pages: hash anchors are not sent as part of a Referer:. It then sounds as if the Analytics team sent a nastygram to the search team, who threw in a patch to make the Analytics team stop yelling at them. ;P)

I think it has to do with Google Instant. They redirect so that the referrer is accurate. With Instant and without a redirect you could have different search terms in the URL that would be sent as a referrer.

I found this reference from Google's analytics blog (which documents the change in Referer:s that people should expect), which seems to argue that ot is right: this behavior has been in place since 2009.

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/04/upcoming-change-to-goo...

(edit:) One of the comments from "Brett Crosby, Sr. Manager, Google Analytics" looks interesting:

"""Sorry for the delay in responding (especially Andre), I was seeking clarification from the search team. A lot of the comments were directed to them and I think it is best to let that team handle those questions. I do want to answer some of the Analytics questions though. Phil's comment above is correct. I posted this because a couple months ago Google tested some search results that added a # into the URL. This created a big problem for people interested in seeing which keywords were driving traffic to their site (anything in the URL after a # doesn't get passed in the referrer... this is particularly a problem for web analytics products), so we worked with the search team to stop that test until they could find a better solution. The announcement above is the answer to that. It allows them to test new search results without the negative side effects (if it introduced others, that was not the intent). Some of the other comments had interesting theories about why we did this (grassy knolls not included), but the goal was to allow new tests of search without making it difficult for analytics products to report on query data."""

The post he is talking about from Phil, for reference:

"""I have previously heard about (from various sources) the intent by Google to roll-out a hash '#' in the search results page URL that would strip the paramaters altogether - is this blog entry implying that this will not happen now?? or is this something different?"""

This also puts forward an alternative explanation for why this is served only to JavaScript-capable clients than my theory below (which was that the goal was to use JavaScript to make the behavior transparent, but that that intention failed at a later point and was not noticed).

Honestly, this new explanation makes even more sense, now that I notice that the search query no longer exists in the Referer: portion of the /webhp URL that is being used for the super-fast AJAX Google search pages they have been deploying for a while now.

(That said, it is still really weird that they choose to hide the behavior until onmousedown; the only reason it would seen beneficial to do that is if they wanted to make the behavior transparent, and the way it is currently implemented seems to fail to do that: interacting with the link at all causes the URL to change to a /url URL.)

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.

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.)

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: http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2009/07/should-your-mom-use-g...

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.

sorry, that doesn't work for me with Chrome 16 on OS X Lion. I still get a google indirect link.

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.

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?

Any theories as to why Google decided to put the indirection in place? Too many NoScript users? A patent pressure?

I have never experienced this behavior in google, but would be very annoyed if I had.

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).

My other addons have no reason to alter google's search page.

noscript is the key; the HTML of the search result pages contain the direct links, and a javascript piece that is loaded later on adds the tracker URL.

But noscript says that it's not blocking anything on my search results pages. Does google detect my addons and remove the redirects if I might be blocking them?

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.

Wouldn't it be easier/faster to just parse the desired URL from the link?

Interestingly, this allows Google to measure the performance of a website from users' perspective by simply measuring the time it takes for a redirect.

That information can be very helpful to see how the web works for everyone.

I'm quite skeptical they can do this with a redirect. How would it work?

I am sure it doesn't.

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

On positive side

If the site is infected ...Google shows the warning message and it doesn't do the redirection. Saves the users from infected site.

I tried the Chrome extension and it seems to have no effect for me - the URL is the same.

You're probably in the wrong country (as I am). The script checks to see if (asterisk)google.co(asterisk) is monkeying with the links and stops it. If your local version on Google isn't google.com or google.co.(something) -- in my case, it's www.google.ca -- then it allows the behaviour. You need to alter the script to work for your locale.

A bookmarklet version would've been awesome.

I thought it was for Web History?

Here is what I use:

"Google Tracking B-Gone" userscript - http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/47300

as well as "Restore the Google Cached Link" - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nhihjhedaljdlpkcpf...

(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.)

Cheers, works on Chrome as well.

Link to source as it's simple and clear enough: http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/47300

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