{"id":14489,"date":"2012-01-12T10:10:52","date_gmt":"2012-01-12T15:10:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=14489"},"modified":"2012-01-12T10:10:52","modified_gmt":"2012-01-12T15:10:52","slug":"google-gripes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=14489","title":{"rendered":"Google Gripes"},"content":{"rendered":"

My latest Google gripe<\/a> is a pretty esoteric one, but one that seems to hit me multiple times a day. <\/p>\n

There are often times when I'm in a comment thread somewhere and the discussion causes me to remember a site that I'd visited recently, and I want to share that site. So, I go off to Google to find the site. I recite unto Google the appropriate incantation and it shows the site I want in the results list. So, I hover over that result, FireFox shows the URL in its status bar, and I mentally confirm that it's the link I want. Then I right-click on that Google result and choose 'Copy Link Location', to copy that link to the clipboard for pasting into the comment thread. That's how it has worked, forever.<\/p>\n

But<\/b>, Google has recently broken that. Now, when you hover over a link, something different happens. Google has told FireFox to lie<\/i> about where that link actually goes. It doesn't go to the place FireFox's status bar says. Instead, the link goes to a Google redirect. <\/p>\n

For an example, I just searched on \"bag of dicks\". And I see \"EAT A BAG OF DICKS!\" in the search results. The URL below the search result text says \"eatabagofdicks.com\/\". And hovering over the result, FireFox's status bar says the link goes to \"eatabagofdicks.com\". Just as you'd expect it would. But if I copy that link location, I get this:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.google.com\/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CDEQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Featabagofdicks.com%2F&ei=9vUOT8DxOeHw0gHu_fzNAw&usg=AFQjCNFr1qCLhJZzbOmzzuNjme7d27lDbg<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The link doesn't go to eatabagofdicks.com, it goes to Google. I can no longer use Google to get URLs. The preview URLs on the results page are truncated if they get too long, so I can't just copy that text. I can only get the URL I want if I click the link and actually go to the site.<\/p>\n

Google has deliberately broken FireFox (and other browsers, too, I suspect); they've taught me that I can't necessarily trust FireFox's status bar to tell me where a link goes (possibly a good thing, I guess). But, most importantly, they've broken the way I've been using Google for decades. <\/p>\n

And why does Google do that redirect? Well, I suspect<\/i> it's so they can associate sites I've visited against my Google login. There's probably something in that redirect URL that represents my Google username. If that's true, I expect Google is (or will be) doing something like \"Our data shows that users who searched for this and visited this site also visited this kind of site. Isn't that interesting, Mr Advertiser?\"<\/p>\n

Very disappointing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My latest Google gripe is a pretty esoteric one, but one that seems to hit me multiple times a day. There are often times when I'm in a comment thread somewhere and the discussion causes me to remember a site that I'd visited recently, and I want to share that site. So, I go off […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14489\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}