Hacker News Reader

Comment by sergiotapia | Hacker News Reader

Well kudos on letting my right click and copy URL from search results! I hate how Google insists on using https://www.google.com.bo/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=we... - yeah Google, totally makes sense.

Godspeed duckduckgo!

View on HN

The reason Google sends you through a redirect instead of directly to the site is to prevent those sites from tracking what you searched to get there. When websites look in their referrer header they'll see http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rc...url=http%3A%2F%2Fexample... instead of "https://next.duckduckgo.com/?q=example".

This gives them the advantage of you only being able to see what Google Searches brought people to their site through Google Analytics.

> This gives them the advantage of you only being able to see what Google Searches brought people to their site through Google Analytics

Search terms come in Google's Webmaster Tools. You can only get them in Analytics if you hook up your Webmaster Tools account to your Analytics Account.

It is true that it does promote analytics. However, one key feature of Google analytics giving privacy as a normal user is that you can never actually look at the profile of a user. You can look at stats such as 10/100 people used the "Best Hammers" search term, and that 80/100 people come from the United States. But you can't say look at X IP address and see where they come from, what browser they use, and what search term they used.

This fixes such links: https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/clean-links/

There's probably something similar for Chrome as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com