I find this annoying and noticed this change a year or so ago. Google used to just give you the (as far as I could tell) unadulterated link. In fact, at the time I wondered how/if Google were actually able to track how many people clicked the top link in the results, because it seemed to be the real URL and stayed real even when clicked. I figured they either had so much faith in PageRank that they didn't need to monitor clicks, or they were hiding their tracking in a less obvious way.

Anyway, does anyone know a way in Firefox to stop sites from changing a URL's target when it gets clicked? This seems like it should be an about:config option.