About a week or two ago, I started noticing that I could no longer copy the clean links for search result hits on Google. I thought it was maybe some quirk of a browser I was using, but today when trying to copy a link to a Youtube video, I realized it was actually rolled out globally (it seems).
Basically instead of getting a
https://youtube/. com/watch?v=-ed6UeDp1ek link now through google, (spaced out link to avoid AutoMod)
you will get
https://www.google.com/goto?url=CAES<rest-of-encrypted-blob-containing--versionByte-keyID-cipherText>
The article describes the change in technical detail, and mentions a fix, but the author has kept it private for now so Google doesn’t patch it up (like they probably will or have for this workaround relying on the “Translate Page” feature with a different Browser Language selection [Twitter Link, Aug 27]).
Why it will probably be patched:
Surprised there’s no post about it here already.
Only Hackernews article I could find (4 days ago):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49506338
Edit: It seems to matter a lot whether your network is deemed “spammy” or problematic by Google for the encrypted URLs to kick in, even if you’re logged out. Funnily enough my google searches went back to normal a few hours after I posted this. So a logged out session might get the regular, unencrypted links if your IP network has a good rating on Google’s end. Mine often runs into captchas and the like, so it makes sense why I’d be targeted by this new change.
Then again, I just tested on my mobile cellular on a logged out search, and I still have the goto’s. Can’t really control that.
Just switch. To anything, really.
I got this too a few weeks ago and couldn’t find any information on how to convert the address back to normal. I guess it makes sense if most people don’t get those results. My fix was to just use a different search engine.
fyi, I got it while I was logged in.
If you are in android, try the URLCheck from the F-droid store.not sure if works with this, but it work with SoundCloud that do something close
Duck is as good as Google was before they got gimped by laws and insane levels of advertising. Have been using it religiously for months, no issues.
I’ve been using duck for at least 3 years, probably closer to 6 or 7. When I first used it, its searches were okay, but if I couldn’t find what I was looking for a quick trip to Google would fix that. I felt like it improved slightly over some time, but also Google got a lot worse. Now with the AI proliferation, I never bother going to Google, and duck is still better than it was a year or two ago. Their AI has about a 20 or 30% success rate for me, but I just use it as a top search if I use it at all. I would love it if the results didn’t change when I run the same search 2 minutes apart, though.
Kagi user for over two years now, can recommend if you’re not against paying for quality search.
The future of search engines is in the settings. Allowing you to control how you search is the only weapon against the direction Google imagine we all should find stuff online.
Kagi is the only search engine who has embraced this and they get my money for it.
Startpage is another alternative if you use more than the free searches Kagi gives you. I usually reserve my Kagi searches for when other engines like Startpage, Qwant, DDG, etc. have failed me.
Maybe its just me, but I find I get way more useless seo blog spam results using DuckDuckGo.
DDG uses Bing’s index. I assume Bing doesn’t nerf AI in rankings as I get so many slop AI SEO sites that I don’t get on an equivalent Google search. I used DDG itself before like 2024, but now I reflexively add !g if I don’t think !w will work.
Ddg used to give non bubble results, it was their thing. Now its sucks and is location based even when disabled. DDG went to the dogs years ago.
Qwant
DDG NoAI site seems to help.
Forgive the ignorance, but what is !g and !w? And is it added at the end of the search or…?
They are search flags for DDG that direct your search to Google or Wikipedia, respectively.
Yep! There are also a lot of other bangs. For example, !rt will redirect the search query to rotten tomatoes. It’s a pretty neat feature.
Dope, is there a repository for these?
DuckDuckGo has the concept of predefined bangs, in which a search prepended by a bang—a !, followed by one or more letters or characters and a space—redirects a search to another site. Some other sites have adopted the concept. More information can be found at https://duckduckgo.com/bangs.
[EDIT] !g and !w will take you to Google and Wikipedia, respectively.
Same. I’ve been using DDG as my default for years, but it’s main strength for me is using !g to redo the search after not finding anything good the first time.
This. Can’t tell you the last time I used Google directly.
A few days ago when I was converting an old windows desktop to Linux I hit Google on accident (Firefox default).
On the first page I got 2 traditional search results. They were links to AI slop sites. The entire rest of the page was full of useless crap.
true, the only thing i sometimes have to go back to google is for an image search
Ddg always does a “word1 OR word2 OR word3” search for me, which is useless half of the time and always annoying. Did i set a wrong option or something?
Kagi and Startpage are better.
Surprised nobody has mentioned Ecosia yet. Web searches there are responsible for planting 250,000,000 trees. I can’t think of a better justification for using a search engine.
Just a heads up, Ecosia relies on you clicking on Microsoft and Google provided ads for its revenue.
From there FAQ:
Do we plant trees if we don’t click on ads?
Like other search engines, we make money when people click on the ads shown in our search results. […]
How does Ecosia compare to other search engines?
[…] We provide industry standard search results together with our partners Google and Bing. […]
I just tried Ecosia again after a long while (I last tried it around sometime in early 2020/21) and it seems a lot nicer and better than before. I’ll use it for a little bit then :$
Good on you for trying
I love ecosia.
STOP USING GOOGLE PRODUCT A FFS THEY ARE SHIT.
They use Bing and google on the back end.
Sure, a lot of other search engines do. I believe ecosia is the one building their own index though.
Kagi ia my favorite. Finds what I actually need like its 08 again.
Looks like they have a browser too. Anyone know if it’s chromium?
It’s Chromium, according to Wikipedia.
Stopped using them after being pestered by cloudflare garbage every 2nd visit despite having cookies enabled for it.
Gods forbid we be inconvenienced in the slightest.
There’s linkcleaner and wheregoes, maybe they’ll work.
I am not sure how they “clean” it. If you put in a youtube link or amazon, they can easily clean it because they just need to remove everything after the
?E.g,
https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQbecomeshttps://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQHowever, by google doing this, you’re forced to check the link to see what the redirection even is. By the time you click to share that, you’re already tracked.
You’ve probably not seen it. It only happens when you’re logged out.
Heh, I haven’t seen it because I don’t use google.
Glad we have stuff like Startpage and Kagi, which are both better than Google anyways. There’s also Qwant, but it’s not as good as Kagi or Startpage.
laughs in Qwant
I wasn’t aware of Qwant. It seems to build its own index instead of relying on other providers (great), and has proper backing to be a viable competitor in something so big (the French government seems to endorse it; along with institutional use in EU parliament?).
I just tested it and unfortunately got a 403 however (FORBIDDEN). Though I was behind an endpoint of a very popular VPN for some testing, that sucks regardless.
Actually, before I could post this, I tried the search refresh and it worked somehow.
To test again I switched to another server of the same VPN provider (same selected country) and tried searching. Same error, which didn’t go away after doing the refresh. So they might have some sort of spam prevention measure which eases itself automatically, but I feel like it could definitely be implemented better if that’s the case.Edit: Yep, if you sit on that 403 page for 5-6 minutes without doing anything and then hit the relaunch your search button, things work as intended afterwards.
turn off your adblocker
edit: lmao why so many downvotes? this is what qwant does when you use an adblocker
Who raw dogs the Internet?
if you have a good adblocker, you can turn it off for sites that have responsible policies with privacy and advertising and are barely scraping by as it is.
if you can’t turn your adblocker for specific sites, get a better one. ublock origin is great.
in case you can’t stand ads and need an ethical search engine get something like kagi. you have to pay for it but these websites can’t operate for free. don’t leech off companies that are struggling.
URL parameters were a mistake.
Wish granted. All you now have is
https://www.google.com/gotowith hidden HTTP POST parameters.
