Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update

autom.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 545 posts

Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update

#2

Post by 1e1a »

Direct URLs in Google search results have been replaced with redirect URLs in the form of www.google.com/goto?url=.

The base64 data appears to consist of a very basic protobuf structure, containing a long string of bytes in field 2 which presumably identify the URL.

Sometimes, these redirect URLs take a perceivable amount of time to load, which is very irritating.

Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update

#6

Post by joeblubaugh »

liquid_thyme wrote: post #5

I've been using the 'ClearURLs' FF addon for quite a while now, and it gives you the URLs back in the results. https://docs.clearurls.xyz/

That wouldn’t work at all with this url format - the url can only be resolved by requesting the goto link.

I recommend reading more than the headline

Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update

#8

Post by stackghost »

nullbio wrote: post #7

The enshittification continues. Nothing good ever comes from businesses desperately trying to protect their moats rather than making their products better so they don't need to.

Thank Prabhakar Raghavan for that. After destroying Yahoo’s search product he failed up and did the same at Google.

In reward for making Google Search materially worse in every way except ad revenue, he failed up again and was promoted to a cushy do-nothing role.

Everything wrong with the tech industry, embodied in a single person.

Post reply on HN