[soup10]

AdWords is and always has been the goose that lays the golden eggs, none of Google's other initiatives have ever rivaled that revenue. That's why they put so much effort into bolstering and optimizing their search results pages.

[HenryBemis]

Another reason is the use of add-ons such as: "Google search link fix - Prevents Google and Yandex search pages from modifying search result links when you click them."

I have stopped using Google a few years ago, but just in case I keep this (or similar) add-ons of my Firefox.

I have no idea of the popularity of such addons, but they would also impact the tracking that Google does.

[igravious]

Oh my God! This is so useful! I hate that I can't right-click on a search result to copy a URL. We definitely used to be able to do this, didn't we?

[propogandist]

It's been this way for ages, although for chrome (iirc) this is managed via hyperlink auditing [1] which allows google to track what you're clicking even though the link appears 'clean'.

The click through google redirect also allows them to track things like relevancy of the content and time on site (if you return to google SERP by clicking the back button), in-case the target site isn't using google analytics (unfortunately most sites do).

[1] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage /links.html#hyperlink-auditing

Hyperlink auditing can be blocked with uBlock Origin / uMatrix

[jefftk]

Hmm, right clicking and copying works for me in Chrome and Safari. I just tried searching for "test" and the first result is marked up as:

    <a href="https://www.speedtest.net/"
       ping="/url?...>

Looking at https://caniuse.com/#feat=ping it looks like ping is supported in Chrome, Safari, and Edge, but not Firefox; are you using Firefox?

(Disclosure: I work for Google)

[igravious]

I use both. I'll use this "Google search link fix" extension in Firefox until search results links aren't proxied.

[wbl]

Don't like the product? Switch. While you still can.

[jefftk]

Any search engine is going to want to know what people click on so they can make their product better. For example, I just searched for [test] on DuckDuckGo and when clicking on the first result I see DDG sending a ping back:

    https://improving.duckduckgo.com/t/lc?...

which contains which URL I clicked.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

[Hitton]

That's not true, for instance Startpage doesn't do that.

[jefftk]

Startpage is an anonymizing proxy for Google Search, not a full search engine. Crucially, it doesn't determine how to rank results. If they decided to try to compete with Google, Bing, Yandex, DDG etc directly by bringing ranking in-house they would have a very hard time serving good results without being able to track which of their links were popular among users.

[TheArcane]

I consider myself privacy conscious and have add-ons like muli-account containers, cookie auto-delete, UB Origin and Privacy Badger working in tandem.

It's embarrassing that I wasn't aware of this extension, given how useful it seems - thanks!

[IGotThroughIt]

How safe are all these plugins we install to escape tracking? Are we trying to escape big tech tracking only to hand our information over to extension developers? Looking at network traffic often shows a ton of extensions sending data to some aws server almost perpetually.

Asking because I'm not sure of the answer to this question and lately I've become even warier so I decided to uninstall everything except things I absolutely must have like colorzilla, grammarly and full-page screen capture. For adblocking I use brave and never ever touch firefox, opera or chrome.

There's an extension that appends a share=1 parameter to all quora links to prevent them from forcing you to sign in in order to view a post. I like it but I'm trying to minimize my extensions footprint and I'd rather write my own script to perform the same script.

The question is, how do you get to be sure that an extension is safe?