[Greasemonkey] Google question

[Godmar Back]

My impression too is that it's different from the way it was before. 
Previously, you only have a small chance that the URLs were
redirected, like a sampling, and it was obvious when it was done - you
could reload the search results and the redirects disappeared.

Now it appears to happen all the time, and it makes it impossible to
save PDF files via right-click.

This appears to be unrelated to the personalized search/search history
feature, this is Google tracking for everybody which links they click
on.  I suspect one application Google has in mind is that they
sometimes suggest alternative search terms: you search for A, and they
say "Unsatisfied with the results?  Did you mean to search for A and
B?" - they can only do that if they know that users searching for A
have in the past preferred to choose those links that also contain B.

 - Godmar

On 8/23/05, Jeremy Dunck <jdunck at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/22/05, Brendan Crosser-McGay <verifex at gmail.com> wrote:
> > That is weird, I thought google has been doing this for a long time.  Since
> > when was this new news?  Its true they have been masking the fact that it
> > was redirecting to google, but is there something new about this?  I thought
> > that the whole basis behind how they can track links at all was based upon
> > the "link-back" system, and I thought that they have been using that since
> > forever.
> 
> I think the news is that they're rewriting on mousedown.  They've had
> self-referencing serps for a long time, which then redirected to the
> actual result.  I'm not sure what would have motivated them to go to
> mousedown, since it doesn't allow you to copy the original url or
> anything else useful.
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