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New Google “Feature”
I could swear it wasn’t like this five minutes ago. Check it out, Google search result pages no longer link directly to the resulting pages. In fact, those links now look like http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=$1&q=$2&e=747, in which $i contains the position on the search results page, and $2 is the link’s URI. Why oh why is that?
Update: It has vanished! Google went back to what it was before. I managed to recover the second page of search results for shizzle my nizzle y’all
from my cache. So check that out, too, and note how $1 goes from 11 to 20.
Comments (9)
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They’ve done this before a few times too, particularly when they were beta testing. As far as I know, it only affects some people using Google at some times, never permanently.
Oh… So it’s nothing new? Damn. I had never seen it before.
But really, what could this thing ever be good for? If every link would be like that, we wouldn’t be able to tell which pages we already visited from those which we still have to… erm… check out.
By redirecting users they can register what links get clicked and which not.
I have seen this type of behaviour at google before and when I did I thought ‘wtf?’ too.
I saw it too! Already 4 times…
For a second, I thought I discovered something new… Not!
What’s interesting though is that Google’s contemplating on tracking what links get clicked. I mean, c’mon, don’t they know enough already?
The IP address, cookie, querystring (search terms), … that’s standard stuff that every web server logs. They’re just trying to be by explicitly saying it.
The reason they use the you noticed is to see if their algorithms deliver results. If for most of the searches, Google can come up with relevant results for the search terms, the $1 numbers will be low. If in a lot of cases users don’t find what they are looking for in the first 10-20 results (so the $1 numbers are on average higher), Google will conclude they are doing something wrong and might adapt the algorithm.
They probably do it on a subset of their servers every now and then, and keep track of the average value and std deviation of the $1.
? That term was clearly invented by an engineer, not a marketeer :)
I just noticed this as well. From what I can tell they wish to find out how many pages deep someone will go to find a link … if you searched 5 pages worth of results to find keywords ‘dynamic dns’ they would know that you really didn’t find what you are looking for on page 1 or 2. I didn’t realize they were still doing this — and 2 machines on my network, 1 does it, 1 doesn’t… so it must be if you have a cookie or something. I just searched out this post looking for anyone else experiencing this effect as well, just noticed my URLs doing that 10 minutes ago.
Sam — the Dynamic DNS man.
The
e=NUMandstart=NUMare showing up only if you have a cookie from Google.I have just tested this. Started my Firefox searched for “blue widgets” and the results were normal.
Then I logged into my AdSense account at Google, then searched again and here they come, the numbers and redirect trackings are there.
I think it has something to do with their registration agreements.
See: http://www.google.com/privacy.html.
IMHO this explains the strange params in the SERP’s URLs.