Over the past couple days, I’ve become plenty annoyed with Google’s tracking links breaking, or failing to return any data. I get the same experience with Yahoo (which loves redirection) quite often – at least with Google SERPs it’s only a small percentage of links that are getting tracked.
Hey Google, if you’re going to implement a feature that does nothing for users, I hope you don’t mind losing a few users in the process. I’m going to switch my default search over to MSN for a bit. Every time Google drives a user to try another search, there’s a chance that the other engine will win the taste test.
For the geeks among you, here’s an (edited down) HTTP trail from WebBug on a Google redirect link:
GET /url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=9&url=http%3A//www.roundtablepizza.com/&ei=owYJQ-PUCqb4-AG79tG_Dg HTTP/1.1
Host: www.google.com
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Cache-Control: private
Location: http://www.roundtablepizza.com/
Set-Cookie: PREF=ID=ddccf96dc54d1008:TM=1124665190:
LM=1124665190:S=nwisHxMdrjO4hjbp;
expires=Sun, 17-Jan-2038 19:14:07 GMT;
path=/; domain=.google.com
As you can see, Google is setting a cookie on the way through the redirect. I assume this allows them to see when a user clicks the back button or “bounces” from the target page back to the SERP. Conspiracy theorists, have fun with that… (Note: I added the line breaks in the cookie code to make it fit our page layout.)
Google’s redirects were annoying me when I wanted to ‘right click, copy link location’ on them. It makes using Google to find links a fair bit harder for me – I find that I often use Google to find links to sites, without visiting sites.
August 21st, 2005 at 9:03 pm
Link tracking seems to be a part of their “personalized search” feature.
August 22nd, 2005 at 5:44 am
Dan – I’m a bit mystified by your claim that Google tracking clicks does not benefit its users…
August 22nd, 2005 at 2:15 pm
Anonymous… I’m sure we’re all open to your ideas about how a redirect script that breaks frequently is better for users than a direct link.
August 23rd, 2005 at 10:21 am
Dan- I was referring to “if you’re going to implement a feature that does nothing for users” – not to issues with the implemention of the feature.
August 23rd, 2005 at 1:09 pm
There is the option to turn personalized search off:
google psearch help
August 23rd, 2005 at 4:20 pm
I’m not talking about personalized search, I’m talking about tracking links that are being inserted for some listings in some search results on google.com.
Anonymously, leaving aside the fact that the implementation is part of what I’m talking about, I’d still love to hear your thoughts on how this feature benefits users at all.
August 23rd, 2005 at 8:17 pm
Interesting quote about switching search engines. :-) I subscribe to an interesting business quotes newsletter from a site called woopidoo and curiously today they mailed me one from Sergey Brin himself related to this very topic:
“Some say Google is God. Others say Google is Satan.
But if they think Google is too powerful, remember
that with search engines unlike other companies,
all it takes is a single click to go to another search engine.”
I switched my default search engine to yahoo the other day. I think this will get more interesting in the next 6 months or so.
August 26th, 2005 at 8:21 am
Foxy neutralizes click tracking for major search engines: http://www.2-power-n.com.
October 13th, 2005 at 7:08 pm