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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

For years, copying a result link in Google was copying a redirect.

When you hovered, it was the actual link. When you right clicked, it changed to a redirect.

There are trivial browser add-ons that fix that, but, yeah, this behavior is annoying, distasteful and borderline deceitful. Not that it'd be shocking though given its origin.

> borderline deceitful

why borderline? It is entirely deliberate deceit.

I don’t see it as deceitful and I’d eat my hat if most other users didn’t agree with me. I expect that when I click a search result link, that Google will be tracking that I’ve done this. I also appreciate being able to search for something, right-click-copy a link, and send it to someone, without it being covered in tracking cruft.

> right-click-copy a link, and send it to someone, without it being covered in tracking cruft.

That’s exactly the use case Google breaks, though: The link gets covered in tracking cruft and it gets very hard to tell where it even leads from just looking at it.

Just tried it. It worked as expected: right-click, copy a link, and it's the link to the source, not Google or a redirect.

They must have fixed it, it wasn't like this in the past. I remember being annoyed by this when I was still using Google.

Here, in a fresh Firefox profile - https://i.imgur.com/RKvnJoq.gif

This may be a Chrome vs Firefox issue, as Firefox doesn’t support the ping attribute for a (link) elements in HTML. The ping attribute allows sending a POST request in the background to arbitrary URLs when a link is clicked.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/a

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