In less than a year, Google made scraping 10× harder | Hacker News Reader

In less than a year, Google made scraping 10× harder

growtika.com

17 pointsGrowtika10 comments

The google.com/goto links feel like it makes it easier to send people to 'bad' sites. Having said that, I'm sure I'm in a tiny minority of people who check the link address in the bottom of the screen when hovering the mouse over the link.

I wonder if it also helps users to _not_ differentiate between an organic search result and an advertised link?

(is there such a thing as an 'organic' search result these days?)

When I observe the link in the status bar I have noticed that before any clicks the link is normal but after any click (for example to copy it) the link to the resource become the link to Google with a lot of blob data.

It used to be like that when they still used "/url?..." redirect links, which have the destination URLs clearly exposed. Maybe it's an intended feature for checking out where does the link leads to. That behavior can be prevented by browser extensions.

Now, on desktop Firefox (private browsing mode, logged out), I see that it always links to the opaque goto URLs, instead of only overwriting on interaction.

Using Google Search while logged in on Chrome Android still presents the older non-opaque /url?... links though.

It's unfortunate that we cannot immediately inspect what the link will lead to, whether the link is the intended (and safe/expected) destination or not.

Woah I just discovered that, it is not that bad that they do that for scraping but what is worse is that it deceptively allows to track user click in a way that is unexpected by them.

It really change the url the moment you click on it, but it is so fast and subtle that you see nothing. But you can see it more clearly by doing a right click, like when you want to "copy the link". Just doing right click, you will see in the status bar the link url changed and it will stay to the google redirect server as target. That sucks hard!

But its been like that since many years, yup?

When you hover google link then it quickly replacea such link from genuine to via google under the hood

exactly and this applies to only sponsored links which is fair

Google has done this before. They want to know what you click. There were extensions to undo it in the past. Then they seemingly switched to javascript and stopped the link jacking for a bit. Today, you shouldn't be using google for search. It is one of the worst options. So this new link jacking really doesn't matter.

Tell people to use firefox with ublock origin and privacy badger. I am sure there are even better combinations. Use something to block junk. I just had to install open source local alternatives for someone who was using snapchat as a private journal. She did not realize anything on private is still read by AI and law enforcement. I can't imagine the personal things she posted thinking it was private when it's not. I think her thrapist may have given her this insane non-private idea for journaling. She looked scared.

Degoogle, decloud, debloat. No google camera apps, photos, or local file apps. You are uploading your images to google if you don't stop using their apps.

I installed two open source apps and told her to try them both since I never used these. June and StoryPad.

Previous discussions:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49447708

Reg. goto links, as far as I remember, this has been in place for quite some time. and it only applies to sponsored links. The rest of the links remain unaffected by this..

There are other search providers, they clearly don't want you scrapping, there is a search api.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com