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.
an underrated feature in duckduckgo is easily toggling between international search results and local (my country) search results. both are things I want often, but I much more rarely want to select any other country, so it makes sense for the toggle to work the way it does. also noai duckduckgo is a blessing.
So google has no problems unleashing their bots on others but they don’t want to get scraped themselves?
That’s the sort of shit that should get your company disbanded in any functioning civilization.
and you guessed it - functioning. that’s the problem.
That’s why everyone should try and avoid google and use some alternatives.
DuckDuck is literally right here.
Qwant, SwissCow, DuckDuckGo and many others.
And it’ll even sometimes show relevant results!
Seriously though, noai.ddg is my default, but I still have to switch to google way too often.
i haven’t had to switch to google in years. when I can’t find something it’s usually because I am looking for something from over a decade ago that nothing can find. I guess you have to search differently with alternative search engines, and I still have that proficiency.
Just put “Tablet” in your user agent, no Goto
Log in and your results are still clean links, so this has spread through scraper people and nobody else.
Nobody else? Screw you, corporate fanboy.
I’ll take getting rearended for 500 before “logging in”
Just switch. To anything, really.
Qwant user here for almost 2 years. (Previously used swisscow for 1 year)
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 only use Brave Search, or a good SearXNG instance.
Kagi user for over two years now, can recommend if you’re not against paying for quality search.
Kagi is really good. I use Qwant because its free and somewhat close, but Kagi was really really good.
I’m against paying for search because I don’t want my search history to be directly tied to my real name via my payment method. I don’t care what their privacy policy says.
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.
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.
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.
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 NoAI site seems to help.
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
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.
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 if you’re consistently searching for info from specific sites.
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.
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?
yeah, this is what usually makes me redo the search with google (and/or liberally use double quotes)
true, the only thing i sometimes have to go back to google is for an image search
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 used Ecosia for a few months last year, but it really struggled with more niche topics and searches in Hungarian. Also it kept re-enabling the AI search every other day, no matter how many times I disabled it. So in the end I switched to noai.duckduckgo.
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.
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.
Looks like they have a browser too. Anyone know if it’s chromium?
It’s Chromium, according to Wikipedia.
Of course it is. I will never not be surprised by the overabundance of chromium based browsers. You’ve got 50:5 Chrome vs. Firefox/Swiftkit alternatives. It’s pathetic honestly.
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
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.
I just tried a test search with Qwant and Startpage. On mobile they returned the exact same results (which were good), which suggests that Startpage is using Qwant there. On desktop though, Startpage was hot garbage. Not a single relevant result on page one, with nearly half being links to Facebook and Instagram. Hard pass on that.
I tested this on mobile too. Opened a Firefox private browsing window, switched to desktop mode and tried the search term on Startpage again. Same trash results as desktop. It’s like they’re actively telling desktop users to piss off.
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
I tried without uBlock Origin on my end and it did indeed work. I incorrectly assumed it was my vpn without properly verifying. Though CactusEcho said there were problems without the adblocker so it may be inconclusive.
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.
Even with ublock origin off that’s happening. So i moved to ecosia
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.
That is just the videos Id, not a tracker…
YouTube appends si=blah for share tracking
I like it so much, and it’s my go-to search tool. Sometimes it struggles to identify official websites, but that only happens in about 1 out of every 100 searches.
I wish it had image search though.
URL parameters were a mistake.
Wish granted. All you now have is
https://www.google.com/gotowith hidden HTTP POST parameters.
