If I hadn't already ditched Google long ago, this would be more than enough to chase me away.
Why? I don't really see why this is bad, other than if your company blocks url shorteners/redirects. What are you losing?
google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
11–20 of 545 posts
Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
#12Brave search (free) or Kagi (paid) are able to replace Google and not feel like I'm missing out.
Brave has its own independent index which is cool.
Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
#13Can someone explain why this matters? Not being flippant I just don’t understand why this would be important.
They were already tracking everything you click but for example if you want to send a link to someone you can't copy the link from the Google result and send it to them, you'd either send them the Google tracking link or go to the website yourself.
Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
#14I use ChatGPT for almost all my searches now. I’m not joking.
I wish one of those free AIs made a search product already. I don't want my search results to be interspersed with text
I guess that the web chat can have a search skill to remove the prose and give only links, plus maybe an excerpt of each result
Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
#15I use ChatGPT for almost all my searches now. I’m not joking.
Yeah, its way faster.
Its not because chatgpt is so superior. Its just because google search is dogshit.
They work on killing the web as we knew it and I fear its kinda working.
Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
#16Can someone explain why this matters? Not being flippant I just don’t understand why this would be important.
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Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
#17Can someone explain why this matters? Not being flippant I just don’t understand why this would be important.
Tracking. Tied to use account, length of stay, how many reclixks, etc for marketing by/ads and surveillance.
Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
#18If I hadn't already ditched Google long ago, this would be more than enough to chase me away.
Why? I don't really see why this is bad, other than if your company blocks url shorteners/redirects. What are you losing?
I use a Firefox extension to rewrite those Google redirects into plain links, to remove Google tracking of which links I click. The extension is broken now
Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
#19The 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.
Well one has to look a level up and ask who the people are who hire such people and why
Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
#20Can someone explain why this matters? Not being flippant I just don’t understand why this would be important.
it sounds like it primarily matters if you are a customer of this company, one that is building a search index off of urls scrapably hardcoded (or at least so as to be easily unencodable in non-realtime, it sounds like?) inside google search result redirects. in theory, there could be noticeable consumer user impact, but ... it would have to be a pretty large theory