Google is spying on my search behavior

6:22 pm maintenance

Do you have a script that scrapes Google search results? Update it!

I was just doing some research on a niche I’m having some sites and when I copied a link from the Google search results I got a link in my clipboard that looked like this: “http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=4&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.domain.com%2F&
ei=8ds0R5G3IZeQ-AKx-9GLCw&usg=AFQjCNFe9Jq42Y9v2DuhD9PD5JEBNu5_Ag&
sig2=TUN_-uC3KFcnQl34VI1bxQ”

I checked all the other search results and when I right clicked on them I could see the real (Google-) URL in the status bar of Firefox.

I tried to get it away by opening another search, but Google still replaces these links, which is extremely annoying.

So if you have a script that should work with the search result URLs, you may want to update it to always take the link displayed as text instead of the actual URL of the Title.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, take a look at the following image:

The red ellipse marks the URL you can trust.

Disclaimer: I don’t know if this happens if you aren’t logged in. But I would update the script anyways, just to be on the safe site.

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