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Ask HN: Have you noticed that Google search links are less clickable lately?
Recently, in Chrome on macOS (Sierra and High Sierra), I find that clicking (wireless mouse and wired mouse tested) on Google search result links does not open the link. I find I'm often clicking on the blue underline of the link and it's not opening. I'll even move the mouse up a few pixels and it still does not open. Why is this happening?
- snazz 8y agoNot on my machine. Likely a Chrome or macOS bug (or a configuration problem... who knows?) Have you tried a Linux live USB or another computer?
- dplgk 8y agoHave not tried other OSes yet.
- kristoft 8y agoThought it were my "miss clicks"! Now its becoming interesting... (i'm on mojave and latest chrome)
- ljoshua 8y agoYes, I'm experiencing the same thing! I recently switched to Brave beta, and thought maybe it was something there, but I opened up Chrome for another task and was hit with the same issue. I've got a couple common extensions running between the two, with uBlock Origin being my most likely culprit if it's an extension thing, but it's definitely annoying! Don't know why it's going on.
- gitgud 8y agoNo clicking problems on Linux. However I have noticed (not sure how recent this is) that Google is NOT redirecting the results with Google urls anymore! which is good news.
- jurgenwerk 8y agoI'm experiencing this recently too.
- paulcole 8y agoNope, no issues here.
- draw_down 8y agoYes, it’s happened to me a lot recently.
- egfx 8y agoHmm, now that I'm thinking about it, I did have one link fail to open on the first try yesterday. But mostly nothing out of the ordinary.
- cauchyk 8y agoYes, i've been experiencing these rather frequently. I disabled all the extensions and it's still happening.
- NVRM 8y agoYes, a lot, getting worse facing a slow network. But dragging or middle click to a new tab is following the link. This looks a lot an issue between the numerous javascript trackers and my browser ad blocker. But no.
- kkoppenhaver 8y agoI've been seeing the same, very frequently especially over the last two weeks.
- nikisweeting 8y agoBeen happening to me for the past month or so, I thought I was just going crazy.
- knewter 8y agoall the time. glad I'm not the only one
- tropo 8y agoJust switch. Google is fully capable of providing excellent results. Today they'd rather please governments, media cartels, and biased employees. Google can get away with this because they aren't hurting for money. Search quality is no longer a priority. Google will treat you like a horse with blinders, or like a small child. Google would rather you not decide things for yourself. Duckduckgo and Bing are decent. Both may seem wonderful if you now try them, but really you've just been getting accustomed to declining quality from Google.
- Wowfunhappy 8y agoGoogle results are still miles ahead of Bing results in my experience. Sometimes when I set up a new computer I'll accidentally search Bing, and the designs are similar enough I don't notice until I realize that the results I'm getting suck.
- jzl 8y agoNot happening to me, but this question reminds me of something I've been wondering for a while: when did Google first start redirecting search result links so they could track what you end up clicking on? Was it like that before 2010? Has it always been that way? I feel like they had direct links throughout most of the 2000's but maybe I'm imagining it.
- gcbw2 8y agoSince forever. And they do it on the onClick event, so you are mislead to believe that the link is clean (as show on your status bar on link mouse over, until the very last second) And they do that on GMail, calendar, and even on mobile apps such as google voice and hangouts. (i.e. if you long press and copy, it is a clean url, if you touch the link, it opens a tracking redirect on the browser --which chrome hides. But you should be using firefox on android as well) Firefox (desktop and mobile) and Chorme (only desktop because google don't want you installing adblockers on their browsers) have an extension called "Skip Redirect" that works-around this problem.
- naikrovek 8y agoI think they just modify the status bar manually on hover. If you right-click a search result URL and copy it to the clipboard, it's the super long redirect URL, even as the browser status bar shows the URL you will be directed to.
- sublupo 8y agoI've wondered for a while how to do that. Is there a JavaScript function that modifies the status bar?
- naikrovek 8y agoYes. Though other commenters have said that it is only supported on some browsers. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/status https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/stat...
- cagmz 8y agoYes, to the point of requiring double clicks.
- jiveturkey 8y agoyep. then i realized it’s not just google search results. that’s just most obvious case.if i click very carefully it works first click. so my working theory is that drag sensitivity has increased. so a sloppy 1 pixel click-drag used to be a click but now it’s an imperceptible drag. i haven’t got up the motivation yet to audit a mouse event log.
- jiveturkey 8y agonope. as another commenter said, it's happens 100% when clicking within a few pixels of the underline. i'll respond to that comment with more detail.
- pookeh 8y agoHappens to me too all the time. I've noticed it usually happens when I click near the bottom of the link. But it may just be the drag sensitivity. Highly annoying.
- udithishara 8y agoYeah, same here Glad it's not just me, i thought my mouse was being buggy OSX Mojave, Latest Chrome
- wingerlang 8y agoI haven't noticed, but testing it it does eat the click. When I tap just on or below the underline, it eats it. Then if I try to move the mouse away and back to the exact same position, the underline doesn't show up (and the hand cursor is the default mouse). To be clear the mouse is at the same position I clicked on before (where it had the hand+underline). Maybe a Chrome bug?
- dwd 8y agoNot just Chrome, also happens for Firefox on Android, and only the last few weeks. Trying to open in a new tab, you can end up selecting text rather than triggering the context menu.
- jiveturkey 8y agoYep, confirmed. When you click within a few vertical pixels of the underline, for click targets that are multiline where only the first line gets the underline, the click gets eaten 100% of the time. I'm sure there are other cases but that's the most obvious since the google search results are formatted like that. line 1 - title line 2 - url the box around line1 && line2 form the click target. the underline only appears when you hover over the target area. if you hit that area between line 1 & line 2, where the underline is drawn, the click is eaten. UPDATE: it's not eaten. it alternately toggles the underline on or off. Also, you have to click above the green URL text for the click to toggle the underline. If you click past the edge of the URL text (under the 'le' in the example above), the click works correctly.
- trelliscoded 8y agoSame here
- dyeje 8y agoThought I was going crazy. Have definitely been experiencing this.
- uptownfunk 8y agoCould it be a play to make the ad impression stay for a longer time? Even a few milliseconds would add up to a lot id imagine.
- jamieweb 8y agoI've been finding the opposite - where they are too clickable... Depending on which Google version loads, sometimes the green URL displayed under the blue title is also clickable. You expect hyperlinks on the WWW to be blue and underlined, so when some green text with no underline is also a link, it can be misleading. Keep an eye out for the cursor changing to a hand, which sounds like a piece of advice from the 1990's!
- Fjolsvith 8y agoI found that its pretty much any link in Chrome for me on Windows 10. Regularly have to click twice to get Chrome to move.