Google no longer provides direct URLs in search results

1e1a

Direct URLs in Google search results have been replaced with redirect URLs in the form of www.google.com/goto?url=<opaque base64 string>. The base64 data appears to consist of a very basic protobuf structure, containing a long string of bytes in field 2 which presumably identify the URL. Sometimes, these redirect URLs take a perceivable amount of time to load, which is very irritating.

JohnFen

If I hadn't already ditched Google long ago, this would be more than enough to chase me away.

liquid_thyme

I've been using the 'ClearURLs' FF addon for quite a while now, and it gives you the URLs back in the results. https://docs.clearurls.xyz/

nullbio

The 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.

donmcronald

I use ChatGPT for almost all my searches now. I’m not joking.

demibabs

Can someone explain why this matters? Not being flippant I just don’t understand why this would be important.

Cider9986

Brave 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.

pbhjpbhj

ISPs can presumably correlate the Google query string with the request following the response to the goto and so make a search index? I guess they would charge too much. Do any large ISPs use visit data to feed into a search index?

fps-hero

It hasn’t provided direct URLs for decades? Not exactly new behaviour. I’ve got something that will blow your mind. Google now has tracking analytics, for get this, your business’s phone number. Some “Adsense partner” convinced our web admin to install a little script which changes your phone number on your website so they track phone call enquires back to search engine leads / advertising spend. Yeah no thanks, that was creepy as hell and had it rolled back ASAP. You’ve got to realise the power these tech companies hold over your business. Don’t show up in the search results, someone lists your business as closed in maps, a tracking phone number goes dead so they can’t call you, you might as well have shut up shop and ceased to exist.

Avicebron

It's sad that instead of searching things other people put up, we're basically asking sam or dario oracle to tell us the truth. The people should be furious. But we've internalized this idea that they are somehow better.

water-drummer

Gemini does something similar

ur-whale

Google Search is dying, and it is showing all the standard symptoms.

rmunn

I've been using DuckDuckGo for years now, ever since it became noticeable that two different people searching for the same search term would get two different results back from Google. Meaning they were no longer completely reliable: they might show one person a result that they hide from the other person by burying it on page 3 where few people ever look. DDG's search results have been poorer recently than they used to — I often see completely unrelated results (to the point of my saying "Why in the world did that come back as a search result??!?") starting from page 2. And yet, I still use them, simply because they aren't Google.

copemaxxxing

I've been using Brave search for a year now, because there is no way to turn off Google AI search. I don't miss Google at all. Goodbye you shit company.

Lvl999Noob

I... Don't see it? It's the result page right? I just search some random string on Google and the results are all direct URLs. Do they get resolved via javascript after page load and replaced automatically? Or am I looking at something else?

firefoxd

At this point, we can all just drop SEO [0]. We are writing content for a robot that hides the source of information. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49665572

Animats

Bing has done that for years. Hated it.

faangguyindia

Most people i see using ChatGPT for any search related work in everyday life. Maybe Google is observing this?

MiroslavPokorny

No longer ? Google has been encoding the target url for years.

adtac

why is this such a bad thing? it's not really any different from using a uuid as a user facing key, which basically everyone does. and trying to protect your moat isn't automatically a bad thing. they clearly feel it's helping competition, so they're closing a hole. competition is good doesn't mean help your competitors . - coming from someone who's been using fastmail as my personal for ~10 years because i don't want my emails to be backprop fodder