Weird Google Redirects?

[MissusC]

I have seen a competitor taking normal site urls and linking to them with some kind of weird google redirect. It looks like this:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http://example.com
Added to the end of this is: e=###.

Can someone tell me what kind of link this is and what would be the purpose of doing this?

Thanks for any insight.

<edit reason: use example.com and de-link>

[edited by: tedster at 11:49 pm (utc) on Aug. 15, 2006]

[Bewenched]

Humm .. good question .. unless they are trying to spoof google into thinking the search came from their search results and thus boost their rankings on a particular page.