Very misleading. Click tracking is a very useful quality signal for search engines. Also, to my knowledge, Google doesn't sell any data -- they're very paranoid

Very misleading. Click tracking is a very useful quality signal for search engines. Also, to my knowledge, Google doesn't sell any data -- they're very paranoid about that kind of thing (if you don't believe me, try buying data from them) The rest of it is about efficiency, not sneakiness. Putting redirects on the links is not only annoying, but it slows things down by forcing your browser to do additional redirects. (and little slowdowns make a big difference) The same thing goes for compressing the JS, etc.