TellHN: Google Search is tracking you much more than they did before | Hacker News Reader

TellHN: Google Search is tracking you much more than they did before

5 pointsbeagle39 comments

Up until a couple of months ago, Google links used to direct me to the search results immediately, except that for a few hours every week or so, I'd notice that the links redirect through Google; I guess that was some kind of A/B testing group I found myself in.

About a month ago for me, every single google result link consistently went through Google before redirecting to the real site, and they weren't even trying to hide it.

As of this morning, the Google search links look like regular links - but they have a javascript event attached that changes them upon clicking to go through google after all.

Test this: Do a google search; hover your mouse over a link; see that it points where you expect; push button down, move the mouse away, release button ("drag the link away") so that you produce a button-down event, but not a follow-link action. Now go back to hover over the link, and you'll notice that it redirects through google.

Sneaky, isn't?

And a shout out to Firefox's amazing "Request Policy" plugin which clued me in on it, and actually lets you manage permissions on this kind of information disclosure.

edit: You do not have to be signed in to google for this to happen, and I couldn't find any setting to deactivate it.

Everything is still happening, but someone fixed it in the last few hours so that it doesn't trigger RequestPolicy. If this post triggered this change - touche, anonymous Google employee. But I'm still going to rewrite my URLs so you don't see my choices.

"But I'm still going to rewrite my URLs so you don't see my choices."

What do you mean by this? How do you rewrite your URLs? Greasemonkey script?

My google has been this way for at least a year, probably two.

It's not a surprise that they want to know what links people are clicking based on what they're searching.

It's just another factor they can use to help improve search results.

Why don't you close the p tags?

Also i think everyone is aware of this.

> Why don't you close the p tags?

I didn't even put any <p> tag there - (you're not supposed and shouldn't be able to put HTML in submissions). It might be a glitch in the matrix :) (pg is modifying the code right now? or something weird like that). But I edited to fix the uninvited tags.

> Also i think everyone is aware of this.

I was aware that they do it intermittently. But now they are doing it full time for everyone. And a lot of people I mentioned this to where not aware even of the intermittent thing.

Note: this happens even if you're not logged in, and have NO web history enabled.

i think you got lucky in not seeing it daily.. It's been that way here for 2 months or so.

That is not true.

Since https strips referer strings from headers the links are redirected through http so that destination websites know the traffic is coming from Google (sans the contents of the query). It is more noticeable now because Google is directing more users to encrypted search.

You can test that by searching through the non-encrypted site and see that the is no redirection.

I was referring to the non-encrypted, non-login search. There seems to be no way to opt out of it.

And it's been happening for a while in this setting; The new thing that started in the last day or two is that they are being sneaky about it - replacing the HREF in the link as soon as you click.

Other posters on this thread have also noticed this behaviour.

This has been happening for at least a few months.

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