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

What is up with the insane long Google results URL now?

mergy.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 77 posts

Re: What is up with the insane long Google results URL now?

#41

Post by craigc »

jackhlaw wrote: post #9

Sucky side effect - Safari's browsing history just lists a whole bunch of really long google URLs. If I'm looking for something particular I have to try every link in the list. Edit: See http://bartkowalski.com/2012/02/google-urls-in-safari-browse... for an example.

Well the original post was about the results pages. These urls are the redirects when you click on one of the results.

This seems like a bug in Safari though and not an issue with Google's URLs although I admit they are not too pretty.

An alternative to trying every link would be to try a different browser.

Re: What is up with the insane long Google results URL now?

#43

Post by dsl »

lelandbatey wrote: post #40
dsl wrote: post #35

I assume someone at Google reviews and approves each one of these parameters that gets added, and each one of them has a good reason for existing (even if we don't know what it is or believe its a good reason). As a thought experiment I figured if I worked at Google how would I quantify the expense of a query parameter. Users don't really know or care what URLs look like anymore as long as the page is fast, so apart…

Maybe I missed it, but where are you getting this data from? It looks quite interesting, and I'd love to see more. Would you be willing/able to share?

I googled for "google searches per day", kept clicking around until I found a few sites that agreed on a number for a recent year. Counted the number of bytes for each URL parameter, then just did a bunch of back of the envelope math. None of it is scientific or probably even close to the actual numbers. Just a thought experiment I did that I thought might be interesting enough for a comment.

Re: What is up with the insane long Google results URL now?

#44

Post by nivla »

marshallford wrote: post #37
nonamegiven wrote: post #31

Easy to work around, no plugins or silliness require. Get to Google via Duck Duck Go as your intermediary. Either from your search bar (if DDG is your default search engine), or directly from the DDG search page, search for !g testing !g tells DDG to send the query to google, and you land on the google results page (not DDG), at the following URL: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=testing Even if you prefer…

I am really interested in this, any tips for automation on chrome so I can use the omni bar and don't have to type !g ?

Click on the "Zebra Crossing" (that used to be the wrench/spanner :sigh:) icon > Settings > Search > Manage Search Engines

Scroll to the bottom and add "DDGooG" as Name, duckduckgo.com as the keyword and https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!g%20%s as the URL.

Hover over the URL and select "Make Default".

You are all set :)

Re: What is up with the insane long Google results URL now?

#45

Post by brigade »

craigc wrote: post #41
jackhlaw wrote: post #9

Sucky side effect - Safari's browsing history just lists a whole bunch of really long google URLs. If I'm looking for something particular I have to try every link in the list. Edit: See http://bartkowalski.com/2012/02/google-urls-in-safari-browse... for an example.

Well the original post was about the results pages. These urls are the redirects when you click on one of the results. This seems like a bug in Safari though and not an issue with Google's URLs although I admit they are not too pretty. An alternative to trying every link would be to try a different browser.

It's entirely due to Google's client-side redirects. Which are stupid and annoying and Google should fix them.

But since Google doesn't care, the Detox extension works nicely. Though it's always somewhat sad when you have to resort to browser extensions to work around web programmers' stupidity.

EDIT: Also, I just tried your suggestion of a different browser, and tried Google's own browser. The stupid titleless redirection URLs are still there, cluttering up your history. So that doesn't really fix it.

Re: What is up with the insane long Google results URL now?

#46

Post by magicalist »

nivla wrote: post #44
marshallford wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am really interested in this, any tips for automation on chrome so I can use the omni bar and don't have to type !g ?

Click on the "Zebra Crossing" (that used to be the wrench/spanner :sigh:) icon > Settings > Search > Manage Search Engines Scroll to the bottom and add "DDGooG" as Name, duckduckgo.com as the keyword and https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!g%20%s as the URL. Hover over the URL and select "Make Default". You are all set :)

That's a start, but it's a pretty roundabout way to do it.

You can just use https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s directly :)

Re: What is up with the insane long Google results URL now?

#47

Post by alxndr »

magicalist wrote: post #46
nivla wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Click on the "Zebra Crossing" (that used to be the wrench/spanner :sigh:) icon > Settings > Search > Manage Search Engines Scroll to the bottom and add "DDGooG" as Name, duckduckgo.com as the keyword and https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!g%20%s as the URL. Hover over the URL and select "Make Default". You are all set :)

That's a start, but it's a pretty roundabout way to do it. You can just use https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s directly :)

...and make ones for Google Images, Google Maps, Wikipedia, and lots of other sites...

Re: What is up with the insane long Google results URL now?

#48

Post by polyfractal »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #18

Google's search URLs have slowly been creeping up in length over years. Some of the parameters like hl are for user interface control (in this case, langauge). Others like sourceid are for broad tracking of who's using Google how. And lately there are many more nonces mostly related to tracking individual users, Google+, instant search, etc. Many of those change based on who you are logged in as. Google is also respo…

I don't have a problem with the _escaped_fragment_ stuff, since no human is supposed to ever see those. I utilize those on my single-page JS website and it is fantastic. Google can index my site while I can serve blazingly fast pages to my users.

If a human ever sees an _escaped_fragment_ page...something terribly wrong has happened.

Re: What is up with the insane long Google results URL now?

#49

Post by Cogito »

dsl wrote: post #43
lelandbatey wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I missed it, but where are you getting this data from? It looks quite interesting, and I'd love to see more. Would you be willing/able to share?

I googled for "google searches per day", kept clicking around until I found a few sites that agreed on a number for a recent year. Counted the number of bytes for each URL parameter, then just did a bunch of back of the envelope math. None of it is scientific or probably even close to the actual numbers. Just a thought experiment I did that I thought might be interesting enough for a comment.

You were correct, but maybe add some more details and links to your sources?

Re: What is up with the insane long Google results URL now?

#50

Post by magicalist »

alxndr wrote: post #47
magicalist wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a start, but it's a pretty roundabout way to do it. You can just use https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s directly :)

...and make ones for Google Images, Google Maps, Wikipedia, and lots of other sites...

right, but that's different than what the GP to my post was asking, which was how to automate a regular google search with the clean URL without having to type !g every time.
Post reply on HN