Dave’s Rants

I noticed that Google seemed to be tracking what links I was clicking earlier on today but thought I was going insane. I decided that it must have been like that the whole time, but when I did a search on Google Ireland just there I noticed it wasn’t monitoring the clicks which makes me wonder when Google implemented this on Google.com


If I go to this Search Page by entering a search string in the Google toolbar, the URLs are rewritten as can be seen in the first image below.


However when I go to the Google Ireland search results page the URLs come up plain as shown in the second image. So can anyone please tell me what is going on? Have I gone insane or was it always like this?

Image 1

Image 2

Update (26th February 2005 15:00)
Phillip explained to me in an email that I haven’t gone insane and that Google does this sometimes.

Google sometimes tracks clicks. They don’t always do it, only for smaller experimental groups. Still, a small group in relation to Google’s immense traffic should be a large enough sample to be valuable. Could be million of such links per day, I don’t know… I sometimes come across them too. Other search engines used to do this all the time, kind of annoying! (Especially because of visited vs unvisited link colors etc.)