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Hello71

and what is the rut=4a9ada2347e29c8fce96a95bde34e6343c279202dbc22b4fe61524ab39bf8eff for?

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It is a random hash (not any kind of user identifier) for security to make sure we don't have an open proxy.

I think the term you want is open redirect

I'm sorry but why do you post an example of an href, saying it's "horrible", when you don't know what it is doing?

Because I can no longer just right click copy or hold/tap to link it to a friend

You can. The link still works, it's just ugly. And, as @yegg said, it's because you're browsing the lite version. Just disable the anti-tracking feature if you want.

This ddg redirect misfeature should be opt-in, not opt-out, imo.

Considering this is a well-known, well-advertised feature from many many many years ago, and has long been the way they do things, it's not going to suddenly change because you think more people should be tracked by default.

Considering it is a misfeature, I'd rather they think twice: I'm neither on a older browser nor do I disable JavaScript and yet I'm subject to ddg's terribly slow redirects.

> terribly slow redirects

Huh? Ive just checked with multiple links, it’s quite fast. I don’t think that user experience that can be measured in fractions of second can be referred as “terribly slow”.

Latency is a long tailed distribution, and that's discounting the fact that various regions in the world won't see similar perf. Given the number of times I use ddg in a day, I usually hit slow redirects more often than not. I mean, we didn't go from http1 to http2 / vps to edge / tcp to quic only for ddg to add an additional redirect.

> various regions won’t see similar perf

How’s the latency of ddg redirects depends on the region?

> given the number of times I use ddg in a day

What’s you estimation? A hundred? It’s something like a minute or two of accumulated time. It’s not even worth mentioning.

Also I doubt that the redirect delay should be taken in account at all. The workflow may vary (obviously) but I normally open a link in a separate tab. By the time you click on this tab all the redirect work has finished. What’s your workflow and how does the redirect delay impact it?

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