Hacker News Reader

Comment by aw3c2 | Hacker News Reader

Warning, direct link to PDF. And for some reason it is linked through Google. Direct link is http://www.ics.uci.edu/~franz/Site/pubs-pdf/BC03.pdf

View on HN

The original link seems to be a search result, which makes me wonder could this be used as some sort of SEO technique.

I'm not implying that this was OP's intention, just that from what basic understanding of SEO I have, Google takes into consideration click through rates of a link, higher click throughs resulting in more favorable rankings.

So, theoretically, if you could get a lot of people to visit an article using Google's search link, instead of a direct link, would that somehow convince Google to rank it more favorably?

Again, not something I'm accusing the OP of, just generally wondering.

You are right, It was a search result. I had problems with the link I found in the Wikipedia ( http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.90....) but not sure if simply I was filling the wrong entry box in the submit page.

I imagine google checks that search redirect links actually come from a search result (SR) page, for example by checking the referer.

Should this post be flagged because it is a duplicate bypassing the dup detection by using a google SR link? Perhaps.

Thanks. It is strange, the only think I did was to use "Copy link as..." in the contextual menu.

Yeah, Google has started adding redirect cruft to search results in the past year or so, which is pretty annoying when trying to share links.

Unless my mind is playing tricks on me, Google search results have been that way a lot longer than a year.

You're right, looks like it's been at least since 2009. I recall they used to not have any redirects, and then they started inserting them randomly, for only maybe 5% of search results. Then at some point they got phased in for all results. Thought that phase-in was more recent, but seems not.

Not really cruft, but a very simple way to measure how relevant was that result for the search you did.

Simple and valuable to Google, perhaps, but a major sign that they're no longer doing what's best for users. It breaks the web in at least two ways: makes it slower and hides the true links. I hate that they do this. Nothing has been more destructive of the warm feeling I used to have toward Google. I still use them out of habit but eventually irritation and the rise of some credible competitor will coincide and cause me to switch.

> a major sign that they're no longer doing what's best for users.

How exactly improving the relevance of the returned results is not the best for their users?

> makes it slower

257 ms here. Not that much compared to the 2 seconds the actual server took to start returning the data.

> hides the true links

The proper URL is the green line under the title. Here it says "www.ics.uci.edu/~franz/Site/pubs-pdf/BC03.pdf".

> The proper URL is the green line under the title.

If the URL is short enough that works fine, but if it's longer you can't copy the URL from there, because Google will insert an ellipsis in the middle of the long URL. For example, an article I was searching for just now shows up on the green line as ssdi.di.fct.unl.pt/masters/mcl/content/.../Robinson-CL2000.pdf. Can't copy that, and can't get the original URL from the right-click either!

Isn't this occasional problem worth having in return for better search results? How often you copy the link URL instead of checking what's on the other side?

It'd be nice to have a [PDF] tag in the link.

That's why I use the "Google/Yandex Search link Fix" Firefox extension.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com