Turning off Google search results indirection

http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/22291/turning-off-google-search-results-indirection

by happyman • 15 years ago

152 85 15 years ago

webapps.stackexchange.com

latch• 15 years ago

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.

Craiggybear2• 15 years ago

I like ddg and find its results far more useful.

fmx2• 15 years ago

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.

auxbuss• 15 years ago

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.

bakhlawa• 15 years ago

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.

wazoox2• 15 years ago

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

epi0Bauqu7• 15 years ago

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.

arnorhs• 15 years ago

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.

ComputerGuru• 15 years ago

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.

epi0Bauqu7• 15 years ago

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.

fl3tch• 15 years ago

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.

ward• 15 years ago

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.

pilooch2• 15 years ago

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.

shimon_e2• 15 years ago

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.

lukeschlather• 15 years ago

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.

jimrandomh• 15 years ago

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.

shimon_e2• 15 years ago

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

asto• 15 years ago

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.

olifante• 15 years ago

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

fmx2• 15 years ago

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

stan_rogers• 15 years ago

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.

ck2• 15 years ago

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).

brown9-2• 15 years ago

TFA says this doesn't happen with JS disabled.

nerfhammer• 15 years ago

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

WayneDB• 15 years ago

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.)

muyuu• 15 years ago

Cheers, works on Chrome as well.

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

derekp7• 15 years ago

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.

pbreit• 15 years ago

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.

elnerdo2• 15 years ago

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.

perlgeek• 15 years ago

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.

elnerdo2• 15 years ago

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?

xtacy• 15 years ago

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.

ot3• 15 years ago

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

eddieplan94• 15 years ago

I am sure it doesn't.

_delirium• 15 years ago

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!

click170• 15 years ago

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.

cytzol2• 15 years ago

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.

mrb• 15 years ago

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

ot3• 15 years ago

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.

saurik4• 15 years ago

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).

jonknee2• 15 years ago

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.

saurik4• 15 years ago

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.)

obilgic• 15 years ago

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

RexRollman• 15 years ago

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

stock_toaster2• 15 years ago

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. ;)

hessenwolf• 15 years ago

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.

kaybe2• 15 years ago

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.

jxi• 15 years ago

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.

eddieplan94• 15 years ago

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.

baddox• 15 years ago

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

eddieplan94• 15 years ago

I use mobile Safari.

cytzol2• 15 years ago

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

eddieplan94• 15 years ago

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.

huhtenberg• 15 years ago

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

jmount• 15 years ago

The re-writing is quite bad on Google sponsored links also: http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2009/07/should-your-mom-use-g...

devs1010• 15 years ago

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.

fooandbarify• 15 years ago

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

tiddchristopher• 15 years ago

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?

eps• 15 years ago

A bookmarklet version would've been awesome.

machinarium• 15 years ago

I thought it was for Web History?

jrockway• 15 years ago

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.

Ind007• 15 years ago

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.

Turning off Google search results indirection

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