| > Lately, everything they do seems to be rooted in aggressive data mining and advertising. Yes. My personal pet peeve is when Google breaks search results links for the sake of data mining. Search results links often now no longer give the destination site, but some awful URL like: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&#... This neither improves the web nor helps me organize information. Of course the SER offers a partial link shown in green, but I can't single click copy it, and if I swipe and copy, it doesn't have the protocol. Worse is that the titleless garbage URL goes into Safari's web browsing History, and when after reading several results I want to go back to one, I cannot figure out which is the article I liked, because there's no title in my history: http://i.imgur.com/ogJnx6B.png This is breaking my web. Aside from being broken in my history so I can't tell which of 15 visited results is which, I also cannot even see, months from now when I run the same search, which I've visited before. This redirect counter URL is incredibly useful for "aggressive data mining and marketing", but is so anti-user that it has managed to change my behavior from accepting my default browser search configuration to manually spending the time to change it to something not broken -- and tell other people how to change theirs as well. Now, when I'm researching something I know I've researched before, when I want to see visited sites as visited and want to end up with site titles in my history, I use Duck Duck Go (or even Bing!), so at least I can see what I've visited: DDG: http://i.imgur.com/mj5c5Gt.png / Bing: http://i.imgur.com/xzBCK4Z.png To anyone who uses Safari and wants to expand their "Omni" bar beyond the Googleplex, check out http://safarikeywordsearch.aurlien.net. After installing, right click the page, choose Keyword Search Settings, select a different search engine (d for Duck Duck Go), and set it as default. This is how Google being "evil" influences an influencer to influence others. // The SER are not always broken. Sometimes links are left alone. The behavior changed on me during this post, and at the moment, all links after the first are normal. Unpredictability is itself disconcerting, making users lose trust. |
I wish Google would use the ping attribute on <a> but that's too easy to disable.