Unless my mind is playing tricks on me, Google search results have been that way a lot longer than a year.

You're right, looks like it's been at least since 2009. I recall they used to not have any redirects, and then they started inserting them randomly, for only maybe 5% of search results. Then at some point they got phased in for all results. Thought that phase-in was more recent, but seems not.

Not really cruft, but a very simple way to measure how relevant was that result for the search you did.

Simple and valuable to Google, perhaps, but a major sign that they're no longer doing what's best for users. It breaks the web in at least two ways: makes it slower and hides the true links. I hate that they do this. Nothing has been more destructive of the warm feeling I used to have toward Google. I still use them out of habit but eventually irritation and the rise of some credible competitor will coincide and cause me to switch.

> a major sign that they're no longer doing what's best for users.

How exactly improving the relevance of the returned results is not the best for their users?

> makes it slower

257 ms here. Not that much compared to the 2 seconds the actual server took to start returning the data.

> hides the true links

The proper URL is the green line under the title. Here it says "www.ics.uci.edu/~franz/Site/pubs-pdf/BC03.pdf".

> The proper URL is the green line under the title.

If the URL is short enough that works fine, but if it's longer you can't copy the URL from there, because Google will insert an ellipsis in the middle of the long URL. For example, an article I was searching for just now shows up on the green line as ssdi.di.fct.unl.pt/masters/mcl/content/.../Robinson-CL2000.pdf. Can't copy that, and can't get the original URL from the right-click either!

Isn't this occasional problem worth having in return for better search results? How often you copy the link URL instead of checking what's on the other side?