Google using javascript in their results links.

[waveform]

This is has been happening for a while now.. when I click a link on a Google search result page, sometimes the link is "masked" with javascript.

That is, the link itself looks normal, shows up normal in the status bar, but when I click on it, my browser first goes to something like www.google.com/?url=.... presumably so Google can track my link, before sending me on to the site.

This behaviour seems contrary to Google's own webaster guidelines against "sneaky javascript redirects":
[google.com...]

I think I've managed to disabled it, using adblock in Firefox to ban a couple of google's scripts. But I haven't seen any uproar about the practice.. am I wrong to be so peeved about it?

[whoisgregg]

The "sneaky javascript redirects" that Google is talking about refer to a different practice where sites display a keyword stuffed page to rank in Google and use a javascript redirect to send visitors to a completely different site.

[waveform]

Fair enough. Nevertheless, how do I prevent Google using (what I would term as) tricky javascript in their results links?

[Fotiman]

I'm not sure why anyone would be peeved about it. It still takes you to the results page you want, right? Note, I've never seen this behavior myself, so I can only speculate, but it doesn't sound in any way obtrusive to me.

[whoisgregg]

Since Google is testing AJAX-driven search results, I believe this redirect is what allows referrer-based analytics programs to continue to function. Not really sneaky at all. The new method even gives more information to webmasters by revealing what position the clicked link occupied in the results.

If you want to prevent this behavior for your own browsing, you could knock together a Greasemonkey script to override the default behavior.

If you want to affect this for other users, there's just no way to do so.

[waveform]

I don't mind sending more info to the websites themselves, but on first glance it looks as if *google* is monitoring what I click, which is what peeves me.

It just seems sneaky to show the correct link on the page, and in the status bar when I hover over it, but clicking feeds back to google for some reason.

Part of the peeve is I don't want "tailored" results either, I want clean results - based on site relevance, not what google thinks is relevant to me. I think that muddies what searching the net is all about in the first place, so I want to avoid it, and avoid providing metrics about myself in general.

I've decided to just kill JavaScript entirely on search pages. Works great. Only problem is not getting on-load focus in the textbox. :)

[Fotiman]

Have you found that you can reproduce this behavior? I'd love to have a look and see exactly what is happening, but I can't reproduce it.