Google using redirects to count hits?

google.be under certain conditions producing redirect urls in SERPS

[mincklerstraat]

I was googling a few minutes ago with google.be and noticed that the links in its SERPS pages were redirect links. I.e., searching for obsequious purple widgets produced results for mysite.com, yoursite.com, thisotherguyssite.com, etc., but the statusbar showed that the links formed were actually [google.be?redir=www.mysite.com....] Or some similar redirect url (I've forgotten exactly how it was formatted). These weren't the adwords links or the premier results links, just the ordinary results. Only google.be did this, not google.com, .de, or .ca.

I cleared my drive & memory cookies cache, turned off advanced functions on the toolbar and tried again. Just ordinary links in the google.be SERPS. Turning on the toolbar didn't give the redirects either.

It sounds as if google might be trying to keep tabs on how many people are clicking on the links it turns up in its search results.

I don't *need* to have answers to any of the following questions, but find them interesting enough to suggest: Has anyone else had this in their results? Is google trying to get stats on which links its users click? Does a cookie trigger this or do random users get pages with redirect urls in their search results? If so, when is the cookie left/why/whose results are they going to track? And of course, what on earth are they going to do with this info?

[Mohamed_E]

In November 2002 GoogleGuy wrote in [webmasterworld.com...] :

We normally don't track redirects on urls because it slows users down. That data is useful though, so we sometimes do random sampling to make sure that our quality is still high.

The whole (four page) thread is quite interesting.

[mincklerstraat]

Thanks Mohamed_E, very interesting thread indeed!