6 ms·

What is up with the insane long Google results URL now?

118 points by mergy 14y ago

adrockdust 14y ago
I don't believe this is a new development.
- sigzero 14y ago
  No, but it is a sucky one.
- felixfurtak 14y ago
  It's essentially used by Google to see which search result you clicked on from the original query. Twitter does similar thing with t.co. It never used to happen on a non-logged in Google account, but now it does. It's been like that for at least half a year. The Greasemonkey script is a great work-around, especially if you value your privacy. Or alternatively why not try DuckDuckGo?
- marshray 14y ago
  I think it used to happen only if your User-Agent parsed a few specific ways. I did just recently notice the broken "Copy Link Location" in places where it wasn't before. All the more reason to stick with DDG.
rosche 14y ago
But I really want it to stop. I hate not being able to just "copy link address" off of the results page
- q_revert 14y ago
  using a greasemonkey script like http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/121261 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/121261 can fix this for you.. obviously using such scripts brings it's own issues, but a nice(ish) solution imo
  - vjani 14y ago
    A simpler script that just removes the redirection from the search result links can be found here: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/134151 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/134151
- jakub_g 14y ago
  This is really insane. The only important params from my point of view are (apart from query) hl (language -- important if you use google.com outside of US to have results in English or any other lang), page number, and safe (for filtering). The solutions that could be applied on Google side for this: 1. Perhaps they could add some button like on YouTube and other pages to share the search (be it web search, image search etc.). Of course it will clutter the UI but it's already cluttered and non-intuitive, especially given their experiments (AB testing?). Each few weeks I see something moved, changed, colors tweaked. Think what if Microsoft were doing sth like this with Windows or Office... :) 2. Use the History API to decrappify the URL after the load (it's a kind of cheat, but I would like it).
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- richdougherty 14y ago
  I've just started using Undirect in Chrome. Seems pretty good. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/undirect/dohbiijnjeiejifbgfdhfknogknkglio https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/undirect/dohbiijnj... http://code.google.com/p/undirect/ http://code.google.com/p/undirect/
  - jz10 14y ago
    Thanks for this
- spindritf 14y ago
  I started using Google/Yandex search link fix Fx addon after not being able to copy the address of a .pdf file I googled for. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search-link-fix/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search...
- skeletonjelly 14y ago
  I search Google via DDG, which gives you a nice (albeit, initial) url. https://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=hacker%20news https://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=hacker%20news
- dchichkov 14y ago
  It'd be really nice to be able to right-click and copy-paste clean URL. In some cases people don't need the URL in the browser, and don't need to open the actual page (or pdf document). Sometimes one need the URL itself - to send it via e-mail, copy into a command line, or anywhere else. And in all of these cases it is a pure time waste - going to website (or starting PDF download), or cleaning up the URL, because google deceptively substituted it on a right-click. Or monkeying around with scripts that would prevent Google search from tracking clicks all-together. And one more thing. Just like the original poster says: people hate not being able to just copy the URL. And every time somebody have to waste time cleaning it up, a little bit of hate towards Google sneaks in.
keyboardP 14y ago
It's been like this for a while. A Twitter friend of mine created a simple bookmarklet that you can click which will remove the extra data and allow you to right-click and copy the URL alone. You can drag the bookmarklet from here to your bookmark bar http://techkp.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/copy-pasting-googles-search-results.html http://techkp.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/copy-pasting-googles-se... Click the bookmarklet before copying the link to get the actual URL.
- vjani 14y ago
  Or you could use this greasemonkey script that doesn't even require you to click on the bookmarklet, and it makes all result links direct, so you can reach them faster: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/134151 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/134151
jackhlaw 14y ago
Sucky side effect - Safari's browsing history just lists a whole bunch of really long google URLs. If I'm looking for something particular I have to try every link in the list. Edit: See http://bartkowalski.com/2012/02/google-urls-in-safari-browser-history/ http://bartkowalski.com/2012/02/google-urls-in-safari-browse... for an example.
- craigc 14y ago
  Well the original post was about the results pages. These urls are the redirects when you click on one of the results. This seems like a bug in Safari though and not an issue with Google's URLs although I admit they are not too pretty. An alternative to trying every link would be to try a different browser.
  - brigade 14y ago
    It's entirely due to Google's client-side redirects. Which are stupid and annoying and Google should fix them. But since Google doesn't care, the Detox extension works nicely. Though it's always somewhat sad when you have to resort to browser extensions to work around web programmers' stupidity. EDIT: Also, I just tried your suggestion of a different browser, and tried Google's own browser. The stupid titleless redirection URLs are still there, cluttering up your history. So that doesn't really fix it.
- verisimilitude 14y ago
  Oh my god thank you--I couldn't figure out what was going on w/the browsing history and it was driving me insane. Yeah that's... not a fun problem to deal with.
swlkr 14y ago
In chrome I set my default search engine to "Googol" with the search query: http://google.com/search?q=%s http://google.com/search?q=%s. Seemed to fix it for me
- zeroexzeroone 14y ago
  but then you have to tell everyone who visits your site to do this...
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - tiziano88 14y ago
    obviously Google's servers will see your request and the results in plain text, or do you expect them to be encrypted even there?
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
      - tiziano88 14y ago
        I assumed you were talking about Google tracking you or something. what did you mean with "tracking" then?
  - aprescott 14y ago
    You can now use HTTPS on the www subdomain. Try https://www.google.com/search?q=%s https://www.google.com/search?q=%s as the URL to use. I consistently get this turned into https://www.google.com/search?q=foo&qscrl=1 https://www.google.com/search?q=foo&qscrl=1 which makes it easy enough to cut out the qscrl parameter for linking purposes.
untangle 14y ago
In Chrome, you can lessen the pain by using the "goo.gl" (or similar) extension.
dfc 14y ago
CoralCDN link: http://mergy.org.nyud.net/2013/01/what-is-up-with-the-insane-long-google-results-url-now/ http://mergy.org.nyud.net/2013/01/what-is-up-with-the-insane... I couldn't get through to the main site. Fortunately someone had fetched the page over coralcdn at some earlier point. I wonder if someone wrote a proactive coralcdn bot for HN links.
- mergy 14y ago
  Throwing some more bandwidth on it now. Thanks for the mirror link.
NelsonMinar 14y ago
Google's search URLs have slowly been creeping up in length over years. Some of the parameters like hl are for user interface control (in this case, langauge). Others like sourceid are for broad tracking of who's using Google how. And lately there are many more nonces mostly related to tracking individual users, Google+, instant search, etc. Many of those change based on who you are logged in as. Google is also responsible for all the utm_source spam in Feedburner and other tracked URLs. And they are the ones behind the #! / _escaped_fragment_ nonsense. Google's first search product worked so well mostly because it relied on standard URLs as unique pointers to web pages. It's a shame they're breaking URLs in so many ways now.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- zalew 14y ago
  you don't like it when you search, but you like it when you track your campaigns and stats.
- polyfractal 14y ago
  I don't have a problem with the _escaped_fragment_ stuff, since no human is supposed to ever see those. I utilize those on my single-page JS website and it is fantastic. Google can index my site while I can serve blazingly fast pages to my users. If a human ever sees an _escaped_fragment_ page...something terribly wrong has happened.
j_s 14y ago
This is Google keeping search keywords for their paying customers (changing referer), among other things. Honestly I wouldn't care so much if it weren't so dang slow at random times! Firefox addon (useful many places): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/redirect-remover/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/redirect-remo... Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/undirect/dohbiijnjeiejifbgfdhfknogknkglio https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/undirect/dohbiijnj... Edit: This comment is relevant to search results, not the address bar, my bad!
- mergy 14y ago
  The turnaround time in returning results has definitely increased.
- Cthulhu_ 14y ago
  Thanks for linking to that one, the redirect thing is very annoying (and time-consuming, relatively speaking, which for a speed-obsessed party like google isn't a good thing or very representative)
daave 14y ago
Some of the parameters are there to enable certain performance enhancements. For example: -The home page, after rendering the search box and all that, asynchronously downloads the css, images and html needed to display the chrome around the results listing. -That way it is cached on the client, and when they perform a query, less data has to be downloaded from Google's servers (just the actual results & ads), making the result page render faster. -It knows not to download all the chrome due to the presence of the 'fp' GET parameter, the absence of that parameter will cause the entire results page, including chrome, to be downloaded. I presume the rest of the parameters are useful for similar reasons. It should also be noted that for non-HTML5 compatible browsers, modifying the hash fragment with JavaScript is the only way to change the url that gets bookmarked without causing a page reload (which would add latency), so if you want a bookmarkable local results page for images with certain preferences, adding a bunch of crap (latitude, longitude, preference hash, query, search type, etc.) to the fragment is the only way.
nonamegiven 14y ago
Easy to work around, no plugins or silliness require. Get to Google via Duck Duck Go as your intermediary. Either from your search bar (if DDG is your default search engine), or directly from the DDG search page, search for !g testing !g tells DDG to send the query to google, and you land on the google results page (not DDG), at the following URL: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=testing https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=testing Even if you prefer google to DDG, you should make DDG your default search, and get to google via !g. !gi searches google images. !am searches amazon. !imdb searches imdb, etc. https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html
- marshallford 14y ago
  I am really interested in this, any tips for automation on chrome so I can use the omni bar and don't have to type !g ?
  - nivla 14y ago
    Click on the "Zebra Crossing" (that used to be the wrench/spanner :sigh:) icon > Settings > Search > Manage Search Engines Scroll to the bottom and add "DDGooG" as Name, duckduckgo.com as the keyword and https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!g%20%s https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!g%20%s as the URL. Hover over the URL and select "Make Default". You are all set :)
    - magicalist 14y ago
      That's a start, but it's a pretty roundabout way to do it. You can just use https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s directly :)
      - alxndr 14y ago
        ...and make ones for Google Images, Google Maps, Wikipedia, and lots of other sites...
RexRollman 14y ago
Google: slowing fucking up a good thing.
dsl 14y ago
I assume someone at Google reviews and approves each one of these parameters that gets added, and each one of them has a good reason for existing (even if we don't know what it is or believe its a good reason). As a thought experiment I figured if I worked at Google how would I quantify the expense of a query parameter. Users don't really know or care what URLs look like anymore as long as the page is fast, so apart from measuring the gallons of tears generated on Hacker News, I guess resource usage would be the first logical thing to look at right? Assuming every search is exactly like the one provided in the linked article, and using some public numbers from 2011 on searches/day, these are the top 5 parameters in terms of bandwidth used just transmitting the key and value to the server. gs_l 42.3 Mbps bav 11.7 Mbps bvm 9.1 Mbps fp 8.7 Mbps sclient 6.1 Mbps For just the top 5 thats almost 78 Mb of inbound data per second. Being sent over end users pipes (which are often limited by upload), hitting my transit and peering links, passing through my routers, hitting my front end load balancers, being turned into GoogleInternalProtocolX and fanned out to dozens of servers inside the datacenter over switches and internal routers, and being logged on durable storage for 18 months (assuming they dump this extra data when they strip personal information from the search record). Wow. A general rule of thumb would be for every 20 bytes you add to URLs by way of keys or values, you've increased the overhead of almost every part of the Google infrastructure by 1 MB per second. (Note I did switch from bits to bytes in the final conversion, and this number is sourced from shaky data to start with)
- lelandbatey 14y ago
  Maybe I missed it, but where are you getting this data from? It looks quite interesting, and I'd love to see more. Would you be willing/able to share?
  - dsl 14y ago
    I googled for "google searches per day", kept clicking around until I found a few sites that agreed on a number for a recent year. Counted the number of bytes for each URL parameter, then just did a bunch of back of the envelope math. None of it is scientific or probably even close to the actual numbers. Just a thought experiment I did that I thought might be interesting enough for a comment.
hgpc 14y ago
If you want to share a Google search, you can always use the short and sweet: google.com/#q=keywords
therandomguy 14y ago
Not sure if this is related but I started using this goo.gl extension and it has been great to paste links in emails. I use it all day long especially for Google docs links. http://goo.gl/Ya1kC http://goo.gl/Ya1kC
0xABADC0DA 14y ago
Another way not mentioned yet to get normal URLs is to just use noscript. If you block scripts from google.com then you get normal links.
wahnfrieden 14y ago
Does someone know a working Chrome extension / userscript that will disable the Google search results redirects?
- vjani 14y ago
  Yep, http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/134151 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/134151
readme 14y ago
DuckDuckGo URL: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=test https://duckduckgo.com/?q=test
- firefoxman1 14y ago
  http://www.google.com/search?q=test http://www.google.com/search?q=test
  - quaz3l 14y ago
    Click the search button.
patio11 14y ago
Speculation: way back in the day if you Googled for [software marketing service], liked what you saw, and had me Google for it, I'd get substantially the same results. That has been increasingly untrue for years, due to geotargeted results, personalization, persistence across searches, search refinement, their datacenter model, yadda yadda. If users expect copy/pasting a link to a search so that someone can repro it to actually work, then that search query now has to carry more state than just "What I typed into the Internet before I clicked the Googles" (totally baffling to users, who think this is what selects their results).
- batgaijin 14y ago
  but what the hell is the point of that if the url redirects to another url? do they really want to track people copy-pasting urls into email/ims? if so, why not use goo.gl?
  - jxi 14y ago
    What redirect? And, did you even read the comment that you're replying to? 1. There isn't a redirect from that huge link. 2. The post replying to just explained a theory that doesn't involve tracking: the URL needs to be that long to be unique enough to specify a page with the exact same search results.
    - michaelt 14y ago
      Perform the following experiment: 1. Visit https://www.google.com/search?q=hackernews https://www.google.com/search?q=hackernews 2. Mouse over first result, note the url news.ycombinator.com shown in your browser's status bar. 3. Right-click the first result and 'copy link location' 4. Check what's on your clipboard. For me it's www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDIQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2F&ei=fRb5UNSeD-am0AW88YGQBg&usg=AFQjCNGKJHXhsq1s0-gYR96B--m47G9oRw&bvm=bv.41248874,d.d2k 5. Visit said URL in your browser and note you get redirected to news.ycombinator.com As you can see, you are redirected via a huge link.
franze 14y ago
my job involves copy & pasting URLs into mails, IMs, documents, .. all the time, that's why my google chrome omnibar triggered default search URL is i.e.: https://www.google.com/search?q=hacker+news&pws=0&hl=en (pws - no personalization, hl = language) how to: Google Chrome Settings -> Section "Search" Button "Manage Search Engines" -> Overlay "Other Search Engines" -> Scroll Down -> Add new search engine with the URL https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&pws=0&hl=en https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&pws=0&hl=en -> "Make default" sadly custom search engines aren't synced in chrome, so every time you set up a new browser, you need to add your custom search setting again...
- aaronharnly 14y ago
  This is fantastic advice. Thank you.
89a 14y ago
This company gets worse and worse. Youtube recommendations creeped me out today so I deleted my account, also sick of it asking me to use my real name when it's the most disgusting comment section on the internet
kahirsch 14y ago
One side effect of these is that it's hard to figure out what the minimal parameters are needed to search when you're trying to create a keyword search (or similar task). E.g., I can type "gna harry carey" in my address bar to search in the Google News Archive, but they've broken my URLs several times and sometimes the fix was far from intuitive. (Right now, for gna I use "https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&q=%s&tbs=ar:1 https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&#3... ) Since we're on the topic of Google searches, have other people noticed that advanced searches have become quite a bit worse over the last couple of years? The basic search is often quite astounding in how it gets what you want at the top of the results, but using advanced operators often produces quite strange results. This is even more obvious in the non-web searches, such as Google News, Google Groups, patents, and Google Books. There you can see a result, but then if you add a restriction to the search, such as date range, or "group:" or "ininventor:", it won't find any results--even the ones you just saw which match new criteria.

118 points by mergy 14y ago

adrockdust 14y ago

I don't believe this is a new development.

sigzero 14y ago
No, but it is a sucky one.
felixfurtak 14y ago
It's essentially used by Google to see which search result you clicked on from the original query. Twitter does similar thing with t.co. It never used to happen on a non-logged in Google account, but now it does. It's been like that for at least half a year. The Greasemonkey script is a great work-around, especially if you value your privacy. Or alternatively why not try DuckDuckGo?
marshray 14y ago
I think it used to happen only if your User-Agent parsed a few specific ways. I did just recently notice the broken "Copy Link Location" in places where it wasn't before. All the more reason to stick with DDG.

rosche 14y ago

But I really want it to stop. I hate not being able to just "copy link address" off of the results page

q_revert 14y ago
using a greasemonkey script like http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/121261 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/121261 can fix this for you.. obviously using such scripts brings it's own issues, but a nice(ish) solution imo
- vjani 14y ago
  A simpler script that just removes the redirection from the search result links can be found here: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/134151 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/134151
jakub_g 14y ago
This is really insane. The only important params from my point of view are (apart from query) hl (language -- important if you use google.com outside of US to have results in English or any other lang), page number, and safe (for filtering). The solutions that could be applied on Google side for this: 1. Perhaps they could add some button like on YouTube and other pages to share the search (be it web search, image search etc.). Of course it will clutter the UI but it's already cluttered and non-intuitive, especially given their experiments (AB testing?). Each few weeks I see something moved, changed, colors tweaked. Think what if Microsoft were doing sth like this with Windows or Office... :) 2. Use the History API to decrappify the URL after the load (it's a kind of cheat, but I would like it).
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
richdougherty 14y ago
I've just started using Undirect in Chrome. Seems pretty good. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/undirect/dohbiijnjeiejifbgfdhfknogknkglio https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/undirect/dohbiijnj... http://code.google.com/p/undirect/ http://code.google.com/p/undirect/
- jz10 14y ago
  Thanks for this
spindritf 14y ago
I started using Google/Yandex search link fix Fx addon after not being able to copy the address of a .pdf file I googled for. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search-link-fix/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search...
skeletonjelly 14y ago
I search Google via DDG, which gives you a nice (albeit, initial) url. https://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=hacker%20news https://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=hacker%20news
dchichkov 14y ago
It'd be really nice to be able to right-click and copy-paste clean URL. In some cases people don't need the URL in the browser, and don't need to open the actual page (or pdf document). Sometimes one need the URL itself - to send it via e-mail, copy into a command line, or anywhere else. And in all of these cases it is a pure time waste - going to website (or starting PDF download), or cleaning up the URL, because google deceptively substituted it on a right-click. Or monkeying around with scripts that would prevent Google search from tracking clicks all-together. And one more thing. Just like the original poster says: people hate not being able to just copy the URL. And every time somebody have to waste time cleaning it up, a little bit of hate towards Google sneaks in.

keyboardP 14y ago

It's been like this for a while. A Twitter friend of mine created a simple bookmarklet that you can click which will remove the extra data and allow you to right-click and copy the URL alone. You can drag the bookmarklet from here to your bookmark bar http://techkp.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/copy-pasting-googles-search-results.html http://techkp.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/copy-pasting-googles-se... Click the bookmarklet before copying the link to get the actual URL.

vjani 14y ago
Or you could use this greasemonkey script that doesn't even require you to click on the bookmarklet, and it makes all result links direct, so you can reach them faster: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/134151 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/134151

jackhlaw 14y ago

Sucky side effect - Safari's browsing history just lists a whole bunch of really long google URLs. If I'm looking for something particular I have to try every link in the list. Edit: See http://bartkowalski.com/2012/02/google-urls-in-safari-browser-history/ http://bartkowalski.com/2012/02/google-urls-in-safari-browse... for an example.

craigc 14y ago
Well the original post was about the results pages. These urls are the redirects when you click on one of the results. This seems like a bug in Safari though and not an issue with Google's URLs although I admit they are not too pretty. An alternative to trying every link would be to try a different browser.
- brigade 14y ago
  It's entirely due to Google's client-side redirects. Which are stupid and annoying and Google should fix them. But since Google doesn't care, the Detox extension works nicely. Though it's always somewhat sad when you have to resort to browser extensions to work around web programmers' stupidity. EDIT: Also, I just tried your suggestion of a different browser, and tried Google's own browser. The stupid titleless redirection URLs are still there, cluttering up your history. So that doesn't really fix it.
verisimilitude 14y ago
Oh my god thank you--I couldn't figure out what was going on w/the browsing history and it was driving me insane. Yeah that's... not a fun problem to deal with.

swlkr 14y ago

In chrome I set my default search engine to "Googol" with the search query: http://google.com/search?q=%s http://google.com/search?q=%s. Seemed to fix it for me

zeroexzeroone 14y ago
but then you have to tell everyone who visits your site to do this...
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- tiziano88 14y ago
  obviously Google's servers will see your request and the results in plain text, or do you expect them to be encrypted even there?
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
    - tiziano88 14y ago
      I assumed you were talking about Google tracking you or something. what did you mean with "tracking" then?
- aprescott 14y ago
  You can now use HTTPS on the www subdomain. Try https://www.google.com/search?q=%s https://www.google.com/search?q=%s as the URL to use. I consistently get this turned into https://www.google.com/search?q=foo&qscrl=1 https://www.google.com/search?q=foo&qscrl=1 which makes it easy enough to cut out the qscrl parameter for linking purposes.

untangle 14y ago

In Chrome, you can lessen the pain by using the "goo.gl" (or similar) extension.

dfc 14y ago

CoralCDN link: http://mergy.org.nyud.net/2013/01/what-is-up-with-the-insane-long-google-results-url-now/ http://mergy.org.nyud.net/2013/01/what-is-up-with-the-insane... I couldn't get through to the main site. Fortunately someone had fetched the page over coralcdn at some earlier point. I wonder if someone wrote a proactive coralcdn bot for HN links.

mergy 14y ago
Throwing some more bandwidth on it now. Thanks for the mirror link.

NelsonMinar 14y ago

Google's search URLs have slowly been creeping up in length over years. Some of the parameters like hl are for user interface control (in this case, langauge). Others like sourceid are for broad tracking of who's using Google how. And lately there are many more nonces mostly related to tracking individual users, Google+, instant search, etc. Many of those change based on who you are logged in as. Google is also responsible for all the utm_source spam in Feedburner and other tracked URLs. And they are the ones behind the #! / _escaped_fragment_ nonsense. Google's first search product worked so well mostly because it relied on standard URLs as unique pointers to web pages. It's a shame they're breaking URLs in so many ways now.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
zalew 14y ago
you don't like it when you search, but you like it when you track your campaigns and stats.
polyfractal 14y ago
I don't have a problem with the _escaped_fragment_ stuff, since no human is supposed to ever see those. I utilize those on my single-page JS website and it is fantastic. Google can index my site while I can serve blazingly fast pages to my users. If a human ever sees an _escaped_fragment_ page...something terribly wrong has happened.

j_s 14y ago

This is Google keeping search keywords for their paying customers (changing referer), among other things. Honestly I wouldn't care so much if it weren't so dang slow at random times! Firefox addon (useful many places): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/redirect-remover/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/redirect-remo... Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/undirect/dohbiijnjeiejifbgfdhfknogknkglio https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/undirect/dohbiijnj... Edit: This comment is relevant to search results, not the address bar, my bad!

mergy 14y ago
The turnaround time in returning results has definitely increased.
Cthulhu_ 14y ago
Thanks for linking to that one, the redirect thing is very annoying (and time-consuming, relatively speaking, which for a speed-obsessed party like google isn't a good thing or very representative)

daave 14y ago

Some of the parameters are there to enable certain performance enhancements. For example: -The home page, after rendering the search box and all that, asynchronously downloads the css, images and html needed to display the chrome around the results listing. -That way it is cached on the client, and when they perform a query, less data has to be downloaded from Google's servers (just the actual results & ads), making the result page render faster. -It knows not to download all the chrome due to the presence of the 'fp' GET parameter, the absence of that parameter will cause the entire results page, including chrome, to be downloaded. I presume the rest of the parameters are useful for similar reasons. It should also be noted that for non-HTML5 compatible browsers, modifying the hash fragment with JavaScript is the only way to change the url that gets bookmarked without causing a page reload (which would add latency), so if you want a bookmarkable local results page for images with certain preferences, adding a bunch of crap (latitude, longitude, preference hash, query, search type, etc.) to the fragment is the only way.

nonamegiven 14y ago

Easy to work around, no plugins or silliness require. Get to Google via Duck Duck Go as your intermediary. Either from your search bar (if DDG is your default search engine), or directly from the DDG search page, search for !g testing !g tells DDG to send the query to google, and you land on the google results page (not DDG), at the following URL: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=testing https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=testing Even if you prefer google to DDG, you should make DDG your default search, and get to google via !g. !gi searches google images. !am searches amazon. !imdb searches imdb, etc. https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

marshallford 14y ago
I am really interested in this, any tips for automation on chrome so I can use the omni bar and don't have to type !g ?
- nivla 14y ago
  Click on the "Zebra Crossing" (that used to be the wrench/spanner :sigh:) icon > Settings > Search > Manage Search Engines Scroll to the bottom and add "DDGooG" as Name, duckduckgo.com as the keyword and https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!g%20%s https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!g%20%s as the URL. Hover over the URL and select "Make Default". You are all set :)
  - magicalist 14y ago
    That's a start, but it's a pretty roundabout way to do it. You can just use https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s directly :)
    - alxndr 14y ago
      ...and make ones for Google Images, Google Maps, Wikipedia, and lots of other sites...

RexRollman 14y ago

Google: slowing fucking up a good thing.

dsl 14y ago

I assume someone at Google reviews and approves each one of these parameters that gets added, and each one of them has a good reason for existing (even if we don't know what it is or believe its a good reason). As a thought experiment I figured if I worked at Google how would I quantify the expense of a query parameter. Users don't really know or care what URLs look like anymore as long as the page is fast, so apart from measuring the gallons of tears generated on Hacker News, I guess resource usage would be the first logical thing to look at right? Assuming every search is exactly like the one provided in the linked article, and using some public numbers from 2011 on searches/day, these are the top 5 parameters in terms of bandwidth used just transmitting the key and value to the server. gs_l 42.3 Mbps bav 11.7 Mbps bvm 9.1 Mbps fp 8.7 Mbps sclient 6.1 Mbps For just the top 5 thats almost 78 Mb of inbound data per second. Being sent over end users pipes (which are often limited by upload), hitting my transit and peering links, passing through my routers, hitting my front end load balancers, being turned into GoogleInternalProtocolX and fanned out to dozens of servers inside the datacenter over switches and internal routers, and being logged on durable storage for 18 months (assuming they dump this extra data when they strip personal information from the search record). Wow. A general rule of thumb would be for every 20 bytes you add to URLs by way of keys or values, you've increased the overhead of almost every part of the Google infrastructure by 1 MB per second. (Note I did switch from bits to bytes in the final conversion, and this number is sourced from shaky data to start with)

lelandbatey 14y ago
Maybe I missed it, but where are you getting this data from? It looks quite interesting, and I'd love to see more. Would you be willing/able to share?
- dsl 14y ago
  I googled for "google searches per day", kept clicking around until I found a few sites that agreed on a number for a recent year. Counted the number of bytes for each URL parameter, then just did a bunch of back of the envelope math. None of it is scientific or probably even close to the actual numbers. Just a thought experiment I did that I thought might be interesting enough for a comment.

hgpc 14y ago

If you want to share a Google search, you can always use the short and sweet: google.com/#q=keywords

therandomguy 14y ago

Not sure if this is related but I started using this goo.gl extension and it has been great to paste links in emails. I use it all day long especially for Google docs links. http://goo.gl/Ya1kC http://goo.gl/Ya1kC

0xABADC0DA 14y ago

Another way not mentioned yet to get normal URLs is to just use noscript. If you block scripts from google.com then you get normal links.

wahnfrieden 14y ago

Does someone know a working Chrome extension / userscript that will disable the Google search results redirects?

vjani 14y ago
Yep, http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/134151 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/134151

readme 14y ago

DuckDuckGo URL: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=test https://duckduckgo.com/?q=test

firefoxman1 14y ago
http://www.google.com/search?q=test http://www.google.com/search?q=test
- quaz3l 14y ago
  Click the search button.

patio11 14y ago

Speculation: way back in the day if you Googled for [software marketing service], liked what you saw, and had me Google for it, I'd get substantially the same results. That has been increasingly untrue for years, due to geotargeted results, personalization, persistence across searches, search refinement, their datacenter model, yadda yadda. If users expect copy/pasting a link to a search so that someone can repro it to actually work, then that search query now has to carry more state than just "What I typed into the Internet before I clicked the Googles" (totally baffling to users, who think this is what selects their results).

batgaijin 14y ago
but what the hell is the point of that if the url redirects to another url? do they really want to track people copy-pasting urls into email/ims? if so, why not use goo.gl?
- jxi 14y ago
  What redirect? And, did you even read the comment that you're replying to? 1. There isn't a redirect from that huge link. 2. The post replying to just explained a theory that doesn't involve tracking: the URL needs to be that long to be unique enough to specify a page with the exact same search results.
  - michaelt 14y ago
    Perform the following experiment: 1. Visit https://www.google.com/search?q=hackernews https://www.google.com/search?q=hackernews 2. Mouse over first result, note the url news.ycombinator.com shown in your browser's status bar. 3. Right-click the first result and 'copy link location' 4. Check what's on your clipboard. For me it's www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDIQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2F&ei=fRb5UNSeD-am0AW88YGQBg&usg=AFQjCNGKJHXhsq1s0-gYR96B--m47G9oRw&bvm=bv.41248874,d.d2k 5. Visit said URL in your browser and note you get redirected to news.ycombinator.com As you can see, you are redirected via a huge link.

franze 14y ago

my job involves copy & pasting URLs into mails, IMs, documents, .. all the time, that's why my google chrome omnibar triggered default search URL is i.e.: https://www.google.com/search?q=hacker+news&pws=0&hl=en (pws - no personalization, hl = language) how to: Google Chrome Settings -> Section "Search" Button "Manage Search Engines" -> Overlay "Other Search Engines" -> Scroll Down -> Add new search engine with the URL https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&pws=0&hl=en https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&pws=0&hl=en -> "Make default" sadly custom search engines aren't synced in chrome, so every time you set up a new browser, you need to add your custom search setting again...

aaronharnly 14y ago
This is fantastic advice. Thank you.

89a 14y ago

This company gets worse and worse. Youtube recommendations creeped me out today so I deleted my account, also sick of it asking me to use my real name when it's the most disgusting comment section on the internet

kahirsch 14y ago

One side effect of these is that it's hard to figure out what the minimal parameters are needed to search when you're trying to create a keyword search (or similar task). E.g., I can type "gna harry carey" in my address bar to search in the Google News Archive, but they've broken my URLs several times and sometimes the fix was far from intuitive. (Right now, for gna I use "https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&q=%s&tbs=ar:1 https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&#3... ) Since we're on the topic of Google searches, have other people noticed that advanced searches have become quite a bit worse over the last couple of years? The basic search is often quite astounding in how it gets what you want at the top of the results, but using advanced operators often produces quite strange results. This is even more obvious in the non-web searches, such as Google News, Google Groups, patents, and Google Books. There you can see a result, but then if you add a restriction to the search, such as date range, or "group:" or "ininventor:", it won't find any results--even the ones you just saw which match new criteria.