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Prevent Google from mangling search result links when click/copying on Firefox

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Re: Prevent Google from mangling search result links when click/copying on Firefox

#121

Post by munk-a »

userbinator wrote: post #82
dragonwriter wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why implement a rejected non-standard feature whose primary purpose is to enable surveillance? Something that's in the spec that matters (WHATWG) but not the one that desperately pretends to still have relevance for HTML though it hasn't since it tried to push XHTML 2 (W3C) isn't “rejected” or “nonstandard” in any meaningful sense.

WHATWG, also known as We Have Aligned Totally With Google... The company that has an effectively complete control over the "standard" and churns it frequently to discourage competition...

How that came to be is an interesting study in company PR. MSFT arguably should've had a much more prominent advisory position in WHATWG than Google but WHATWG ended up solidifying in a large part to counter act all the non-standard behavior folks experienced trying to develop cross browser pages in the days when mentioning ie6 would cause a terrified silence to fall on any web dev department.

Re: Prevent Google from mangling search result links when click/copying on Firefox

#122

Post by aembleton »

phkahler wrote: post #39
hospadar wrote: post #15

To add a little color and for clarity: Some google links (notably shopping links for products) don't just point at a google-owned redirect (presumably for ad tracking/payment calculation?), they also change the link target on click (?!?evil!?!). There are redirect-removal addons which re-write the original URL correctly, but the on-click handlers mangle the target of the link if the event is not blocked.

>> There are redirect-removal addons which re-write the original URL correctly, but the on-click handlers mangle the target of the link if the event is not blocked. On-click event handlers should never have been allowed. Hijacking the browser UI is never in the users interest.

I was going to upvote you, but unfortunately it required an on-click event handler.

Re: Prevent Google from mangling search result links when click/copying on Firefox

#123

Post by carom »

blahyawnblah wrote: post #114
carom wrote: post #23

It is really worth it to switch to DuckDuckGo. You can throw a g! at the end of your search if you don't like the results DDG gave and it will redirect you to Google. That was the feature that gave me the confidence to switch over, it's painless to get different results, even on a mobile keyboard.

Isn't it "!g" or do both work?

Both work! Which is really nice on a mobile keyboard since it will do an auto space after the !.

Re: Prevent Google from mangling search result links when click/copying on Firefox

#124

Post by GordonS »

jefftk wrote: post #75
carom wrote: post #23

It is really worth it to switch to DuckDuckGo. You can throw a g! at the end of your search if you don't like the results DDG gave and it will redirect you to Google. That was the feature that gave me the confidence to switch over, it's painless to get different results, even on a mobile keyboard.

DuckDuckGo also tracks what links you click on. Try it: when you click on a link you'll see an immediate ping to https://improving.duckduckgo.com/t/ ... (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

I don't think most folks would have a problem with Google doing it the same way - it makes sense that l you'd want to know what search results were clicked on.

The problem is Google has implemented the tracking in such a way that it's hostile to users, preventing them from copying the target link. There are various ways that Google could allow copying the link whole also enabling tracking if it's explicitly clicked, but Google chose an anti-user option because it almost guarantees people click the link.

Re: Prevent Google from mangling search result links when click/copying on Firefox

#125

Post by jefftk »

GordonS wrote: post #124
jefftk wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DuckDuckGo also tracks what links you click on. Try it: when you click on a link you'll see an immediate ping to https://improving.duckduckgo.com/t/ ... (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

I don't think most folks would have a problem with Google doing it the same way - it makes sense that l you'd want to know what search results were clicked on. The problem is Google has implemented the tracking in such a way that it's hostile to users, preventing them from copying the target link. There are various ways that Google could allow copying the link whole also enabling tracking if it's explicitly clicked ,…

> There are various ways that Google could allow copying the link whole also enabling tracking if it's explicitly clicked, but Google chose an anti-user option because it almost guarantees people click the link.

On browsers that support it (all modern browsers except Firefox) it uses which is exactly what you're looking for.

Re: Prevent Google from mangling search result links when click/copying on Firefox

#126

Post by a-dub »

rasz wrote: post #95
a-dub wrote: post #50

they've been doing this for a very long time. didn't know about this ping attribute for anchors though. i always just assumed it was for improving the index. the more a result gets clicked, the more relevant it must be. it's kind of a zero'th order optimization.

>the more a result gets clicked, the more relevant it must be how? the more clickbaity Yes, but how do you judge quality by action of the uninformed (clicking before viewing content)?

google was originally based on pagerank, which was based on the idea that if you analyze the link structure of the web, you can assign quality scores to pages based on number of inbound links, and then use that quality score to propagate a high quality score to other pages that are linked to by pages with high quality scores. in other words: find the pages with reputations you trust, use their opinions to boost the reputations of other pages in the graph.

you could do the same for people. first off, a user looking at a search results page isn't uninformed, there's lots of signal in the results page for a search query: domain name, familiarity/recognition of domain name, abstract text quality (grammar/spelling), abstract text, spamminess, etc. for the trained eye, that's a good amount of signal, but who has a trained eye?

you could, say, have some ground truth rated webpages that you have human raters rate in house, and then you could use this to score actual users on the website in terms of who frequently picks the known best result. now you have a cohort of users who you trust in terms of clicking on quality search results.

now you just pay attention to what this cohort pays attention to and let their clicks materially boost the ranking of results.

this is just one over simplified way, i'm sure they do tons of stuff like this (with tons of other stuff to avoid abuse/seo/etc).

Re: Prevent Google from mangling search result links when click/copying on Firefox

#128

Post by quotemstr »

akkartik wrote: post #79
mikeiz404 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> …serves no purpose for its users It might be that one of the reasons they track link clicking is to determine “bounce rate” [0] to infer how useful the result is. That is something I would want to know if I were building a search engine and wanted to verify ranking accuracy. Though I would have thought there would be better ways of tracking this than url redirection if JS is enabled. 0: #5 on https://www.spyfu.com/…

Their search results used to be great before they started doing this. In fact, they've started to suck more in the past 10 years, though probably for unrelated reasons. As the Conchords say, "what are your overheads?"

> Their search results used to be great before they started doing this

Google is in an arms race with SEO --- one Google is gradually losing. Removing relevance signals will make search results worse. That Google was able to deliver excellent results ten years ago is irrelevant today: the environment is different and if they went back to what they were doing then, results would be far worse now.

Re: Prevent Google from mangling search result links when click/copying on Firefox

#129

Post by zootboy »

aembleton wrote: post #122
phkahler wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> There are redirect-removal addons which re-write the original URL correctly, but the on-click handlers mangle the target of the link if the event is not blocked. On-click event handlers should never have been allowed. Hijacking the browser UI is never in the users interest.

I was going to upvote you, but unfortunately it required an on-click event handler.

Except that's not true at all. HN works with javascript entirely disabled, and the upvote buttons become actual links.

Re: Prevent Google from mangling search result links when click/copying on Firefox

#130

Post by Trollmann »

jefftk wrote: post #125
GordonS wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think most folks would have a problem with Google doing it the same way - it makes sense that l you'd want to know what search results were clicked on. The problem is Google has implemented the tracking in such a way that it's hostile to users, preventing them from copying the target link. There are various ways that Google could allow copying the link whole also enabling tracking if it's explicitly clicked ,…

> There are various ways that Google could allow copying the link whole also enabling tracking if it's explicitly clicked, but Google chose an anti-user option because it almost guarantees people click the link. On browsers that support it (all modern browsers except Firefox) it uses which is exactly what you're looking for.

Firefox supports it fine but disables the setting by default.
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