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

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

#51

Post by jz10 »

richdougherty wrote: post #19
rosche wrote: post #3

But I really want it to stop. I hate not being able to just "copy link address" off of the results page

I've just started using Undirect in Chrome. Seems pretty good. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/undirect/dohbiijnj... http://code.google.com/p/undirect/

Thanks for this

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

#53

Post by mkjones »

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…

I suspect they care a lot more about the effect these additional upstream bytes have on response time than their own network ingress. Especially for a site that cares so much about performance, an extra handful of bytes on a slow connection can noticeably hurt latency. Lots of small parameters can really add up.

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

#55

Post by pserwylo »

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 ?

To improve on nivla's answer, you can right click on almost any input field and select "Add to search bar". This will build the appropriate URL, based on the text field's name attribute and the action of the form which posts the field.

So if I had a form on "example.com" which had an action of "/do-search", and finally, a text input with a name of "query", then the URL it will add is:

http://example.com/do-search?query=%s

Saves you having to inspect the URL yourself to figure out the parameters.

Then you can go to the settings page nivla mentioned and make it the default search engine, so that any non-url's you enter into the omnibox are redirected to the %s in the URL above.

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

#56

Post by mergy »

j_s wrote: post #25

This is Google keeping search keywords for their paying customers (changing referer), among other things. Honestly I wouldn't care so much if it weren't so dang slow at random times! Firefox addon (useful many places): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/redirect-remo... Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/undirect/dohbiijnj... Edit: This comment is relevant to search results, not the address…

The turnaround time in returning results has definitely increased.

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

#58

Post by verisimilitude »

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.

Oh my god thank you--I couldn't figure out what was going on w/the browsing history and it was driving me insane. Yeah that's... not a fun problem to deal with.

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

#59

Post by patio11 »

Speculation: way back in the day if you Googled for [software marketing service], liked what you saw, and had me Google for it, I'd get substantially the same results. That has been increasingly untrue for years, due to geotargeted results, personalization, persistence across searches, search refinement, their datacenter model, yadda yadda. If users expect copy/pasting a link to a search so that someone can repro it to actually work, then that search query now has to carry more state than just "What I typed into the Internet before I clicked the Googles" (totally baffling to users, who think this is what selects their results).

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

#60

Post by batgaijin »

patio11 wrote: post #59

Speculation: way back in the day if you Googled for [software marketing service], liked what you saw, and had me Google for it, I'd get substantially the same results. That has been increasingly untrue for years, due to geotargeted results, personalization, persistence across searches, search refinement, their datacenter model, yadda yadda. If users expect copy/pasting a link to a search so that someone can repro it…

but what the hell is the point of that if the url redirects to another url? do they really want to track people copy-pasting urls into email/ims? if so, why not use goo.gl?
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