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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

#171

Post by josefx »

mda wrote: post #167
inetknght wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google search is good because Google search might have been good over a decade ago but today it's trash.

10 years ago it was probably way worse than it is today, but people has this fantasy idea of good old google that found everything magically.

The first page of "search results" is usually filled with ads and Google scraping and special casing dozens of sites. It is almost at a point where I have to skip to the "second" page just to get to the actual search results.

Also Google broke a lot of search qualifiers for stupid reasons, like the '+' when they created Google+.

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

#172

Post by cerved »

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.

Google charges ads per click, possibly mainly for that. Also it's a preferred solution to asynchronously ping the log on click rather than a synchronous redirect hack

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

#174

Post by musicale »

It's certainly a bad user experience to not be able to cut and paste links.

It's also kind of a bad web search experience to have actual web search results hidden below ads and Google properties.

On the other hand, "Google search" is very good for searching Youtube and other Google properties.

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

#175

Post by KORraN »

beltsazar wrote: post #24

I have no mangling issue—thanks to uBlock annoyances filter: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/blob/02d16a221c276fe...

Thanks for posting this, this filter indeed fixes the issue. I was recently hit by this, when I was trying to share a link to PDF file. In the end, I worked around it by opening Downloads in Firefox and copying source link from there.

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

#176

Post by perryizgr8 »

eterevsky wrote: post #169
NelsonMinar wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note the caniuse link says "While still in the WHATWG specification, this feature was removed from the W3C HTML5 specification in 2010." Another reason I prefer Firefox. Why implement a rejected non-standard feature whose primary purpose is to enable surveillance?

Why do you call this surveillance? You just voluntarily entered your search terms. Why shouldn't Google know which link you clicked? The main purpose of this information is to improve the service that you are using.

> Why shouldn't Google know which link you clicked?

Why should they? I asked them info. They provided a list of links. Why are they entitled to know which of the links I visited?

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

#177

Post by koolba »

eterevsky wrote: post #169
NelsonMinar wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note the caniuse link says "While still in the WHATWG specification, this feature was removed from the W3C HTML5 specification in 2010." Another reason I prefer Firefox. Why implement a rejected non-standard feature whose primary purpose is to enable surveillance?

Why do you call this surveillance? You just voluntarily entered your search terms. Why shouldn't Google know which link you clicked? The main purpose of this information is to improve the service that you are using.

Because it is surveillance. There’s plenty of surveillance examples with multiple uses and “improving the service” doesn’t blanketedly discount their other uses.

More importantly they make it a pain in the ass to copy the actual URL of a link without actually clicking it. If you right click a search result link then their JS edits the href to the Google tracking link. So you can’t actually examine the entire URL without risking opening it up and being tracked. At best you get whatever preview your browser shows on hover.

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

#178

Post by ddevault »

dudus wrote: post #117
eps wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see no cases when I, as a user, would want my broswer to support "ping" attribute. It's basically shady as fuck.

It would allow Google or other companies to track which result the user clicked without resorting to more complex JavaScript tracking or redirects. I bet anyone would prefer the ping method rather than the redirects we see on Firefox that mangle copied urls. You seem to be of the opinion that no tracking would be better. And that's fine and a popular opinion around here. But that's not an option as Google relies heav…

This might hold up better if Google's rankings were actually good for all of the spyware they add. Here's a search I performed earlier today:

https://l.sr.ht/u1vK.png

The desired result is indicated in red, well below the page break. All of the other results are blogspam, SEO hacking, and mostly useless "featured snippets" and "people also ask".

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

#180

Post by EB-Barrington »

inetknght wrote: post #47
judge2020 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whose primary purpose is to enable surveillance Google search is good because it tracks what links people click and knows when they come back to go to a different url on the page. if 99% of people visit the top result for a query, return, then hit the second one, chances are that the top result never answers what the search query asks.

> Google search is good because Google search might have been good over a decade ago but today it's trash.

I use Google search only for one thing: shopping.

Is this the intention behind everything at Google - advertising/shopping/consumption? If so, congrats to Google I guess.

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