URLs are for People, not Computers

Re:URLs are for People, not Computers by NelsonMinar on Friday April 05, 2013 @10:29AM (#5498607)

Google search result URLs used to be simpler, but they made a decision not to care how they look years ago and they keep stuffing more and more data into them. I assume it helps their tracking and maybe optimization.

Even more offensive are the result URLs on the result page. Here's the URL for a logged out search for "hacker news". https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&...

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Re:URLs are for People, not Computers by NelsonMinar on Friday April 05, 2013 @10:31AM (#5498623)

Ha, the Hacker News page won't even display the URL, it's so ugly. Let's examine it in its full glory

https://www.google.com/url?

sa=t&

rct=j&

q=&

esrc=s&

source=web&

cd=1&

cad=rja&

ved=0CDMQFjAA&

url=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2F&

ei=k99eUcfzOsePiAKjgIG4DA&

usg=AFQjCNGxnV8qCnv_rujodDj6o2ZhqU8Nxg&

bvm=bv.44770516,d.cGE

Note that none of this is necessary for clickthrough tracking; it's easy to do that separately from the href.

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