In less than a year, Google made scraping 10× harder

BLKNSLVR

The google.com/goto links feel like it makes it easier to send people to 'bad' sites. Having said that, I'm sure I'm in a tiny minority of people who check the link address in the bottom of the screen when hovering the mouse over the link. I wonder if it also helps users to _not_ differentiate between an organic search result and an advertised link? (is there such a thing as an 'organic' search result these days?)

throwawayffffas

There are other search providers, they clearly don't want you scrapping, there is a search api.

high_na_euv

But its been like that since many years, yup? When you hover google link then it quickly replacea such link from genuine to via google under the hood

virajk_31

Reg. goto links, as far as I remember, this has been in place for quite some time. and it only applies to sponsored links. The rest of the links remain unaffected by this..

greatgib

Woah I just discovered that, it is not that bad that they do that for scraping but what is worse is that it deceptively allows to track user click in a way that is unexpected by them. It really change the url the moment you click on it, but it is so fast and subtle that you see nothing. But you can see it more clearly by doing a right click, like when you want to "copy the link". Just doing right click, you will see in the status bar the link url changed and it will stay to the google redirect server as target. That sucks hard!