[majormajor]

For the longest time, I didn't even realize that clicking a Google result sent the click back to Google (I just didn't think about it).

Then I right clicked one of the results one day and did "copy link" since I wanted to send it to a friend, and got something like this (with a bunch of other stuff in it too that I've yanked out cause I have no idea if any of it would be identifying info, but the end result is that this link no longer works):

http://www.google.com/url?&source=web&url=http%3A%2F...

I just hadn't thought about it before. It makes sense that they want and use that info, but it wasn't obvious at all that they were collecting it in that way, since the address shown in the status bar is the destination site, not the actual link target. I had just always assumed that the results were based on links and such around the web, and didn't think clicks would be factored in.