About a week or two ago, I started noticing that I could no longer copy the clean links for search result hits on Google. I thought it was maybe some quirk of a browser I was using, but today when trying to copy a link to a Youtube video, I realized it was actually rolled out globally (it seems).
Basically instead of getting a
https://youtube/. com/watch?v=-ed6UeDp1ek link now through google, (spaced out link to avoid AutoMod)
you will get
https://www.google.com/goto?url=CAES<rest-of-encrypted-blob-containing--versionByte-keyID-cipherText>
The article describes the change in technical detail, and mentions a fix, but the author has kept it private for now so Google doesn’t patch it up (like they probably will or have for this workaround relying on the “Translate Page” feature with a different Browser Language selection [Twitter Link, Aug 27]).
Why it will probably be patched:
Surprised there’s no post about it here already.
Only Hackernews article I could find (4 days ago):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49506338
Edit: It seems to matter a lot whether your network is deemed “spammy” or problematic by Google for the encrypted URLs to kick in, even if you’re logged out. Funnily enough my google searches went back to normal a few hours after I posted this. So a logged out session might get the regular, unencrypted links if your IP network has a good rating on Google’s end. Mine often runs into captchas and the like, so it makes sense why I’d be targeted by this new change.
Then again, I just tested on my mobile cellular on a logged out search, and I still have the goto’s. Can’t really control that.
Just put “Tablet” in your user agent, no Goto
So google has no problems unleashing their bots on others but they don’t want to get scraped themselves?
That’s the sort of shit that should get your company disbanded in any functioning civilization.
and you guessed it - functioning. that’s the problem.
Surprised nobody has mentioned Ecosia yet. Web searches there are responsible for planting 250,000,000 trees. I can’t think of a better justification for using a search engine.
I just tried Ecosia again after a long while (I last tried it around sometime in early 2020/21) and it seems a lot nicer and better than before. I’ll use it for a little bit then :$
Good on you for trying
I love ecosia.
STOP USING GOOGLE PRODUCT A FFS THEY ARE SHIT.
Looks like they have a browser too. Anyone know if it’s chromium?
It’s Chromium, according to Wikipedia.
I like it so much, and it’s my go-to search tool. Sometimes it struggles to identify official websites, but that only happens in about 1 out of every 100 searches.
I wish it had image search though.
Glad we have stuff like Startpage and Kagi, which are both better than Google anyways. There’s also Qwant, but it’s not as good as Kagi or Startpage.
I just tried a test search with Qwant and Startpage. On mobile they returned the exact same results (which were good), which suggests that Startpage is using Qwant there. On desktop though, Startpage was hot garbage. Not a single relevant result on page one, with nearly half being links to Facebook and Instagram. Hard pass on that.
I tested this on mobile too. Opened a Firefox private browsing window, switched to desktop mode and tried the search term on Startpage again. Same trash results as desktop. It’s like they’re actively telling desktop users to piss off.
