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.
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.
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 only use Brave Search, or a good SearXNG instance.
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.
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.
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?
Yep, here you go.
Rad! Thank you
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.