Recently, in Chrome on macOS (Sierra and High Sierra), I find that clicking (wireless mouse and wired mouse tested) on Google search result links does not open the link. I find I'm often clicking on the blue underline of the link and it's not opening. I'll even move the mouse up a few pixels and it still does not open. Why is this happening?
Google is fully capable of providing excellent results. Today they'd rather please governments, media cartels, and biased employees. Google can get away with this because they aren't hurting for money. Search quality is no longer a priority. Google will treat you like a horse with blinders, or like a small child. Google would rather you not decide things for yourself.
Duckduckgo and Bing are decent. Both may seem wonderful if you now try them, but really you've just been getting accustomed to declining quality from Google.
Google results are still miles ahead of Bing results in my experience. Sometimes when I set up a new computer I'll accidentally search Bing, and the designs are similar enough I don't notice until I realize that the results I'm getting suck.
I haven't noticed, but testing it it does eat the click.
When I tap just on or below the underline, it eats it. Then if I try to move the mouse away and back to the exact same position, the underline doesn't show up (and the hand cursor is the default mouse). To be clear the mouse is at the same position I clicked on before (where it had the hand+underline). Maybe a Chrome bug?
When you click within a few vertical pixels of the underline, for click targets that are multiline where only the first line gets the underline, the click gets eaten 100% of the time. I'm sure there are other cases but that's the most obvious since the google search results are formatted like that.
line 1 - title
line 2 - url
the box around line1 && line2 form the click target. the underline only appears when you hover over the target area. if you hit that area between line 1 & line 2, where the underline is drawn, the click is eaten.
UPDATE: it's not eaten. it alternately toggles the underline on or off.
Also, you have to click above the green URL text for the click to toggle the underline. If you click past the edge of the URL text (under the 'le' in the example above), the click works correctly.
Not happening to me, but this question reminds me of something I've been wondering for a while: when did Google first start redirecting search result links so they could track what you end up clicking on? Was it like that before 2010? Has it always been that way? I feel like they had direct links throughout most of the 2000's but maybe I'm imagining it.
And they do it on the onClick event, so you are mislead to believe that the link is clean (as show on your status bar on link mouse over, until the very last second)
And they do that on GMail, calendar, and even on mobile apps such as google voice and hangouts. (i.e. if you long press and copy, it is a clean url, if you touch the link, it opens a tracking redirect on the browser --which chrome hides. But you should be using firefox on android as well)
Firefox (desktop and mobile) and Chorme (only desktop because google don't want you installing adblockers on their browsers) have an extension called "Skip Redirect" that works-around this problem.
I think they just modify the status bar manually on hover. If you right-click a search result URL and copy it to the clipboard, it's the super long redirect URL, even as the browser status bar shows the URL you will be directed to.
It depends on the browser. some browsers allow JS code to fool the status bar url, others do not.
If you are using a browser that prevents status bar fooling, you will be able to copy the original link and middle click to avoid tracking. If your browser allows it, then everything will include tracking.
> extension called "Skip Redirect" works-around this problem
Thanks for mentioning that. Google is the the one site where I want it to always work, but it seems the extension has a limitation with Google's links.
At least with Firefox under Windows 7, if you click on a Google link, it won't skip the redirect. It does skip the redirect if you open the link in a new tab, or if you copy the link location, then paste and go from the address bar. Has anyone else noticed this? Maybe I need to tell the author of the extension.
Tracking outbound links is core to the way Google ranks search results.
Think of search as "given this search query, which of the trillions of webpages on the internet will the user end up visiting?".
By looking at historic answers to that question from other users, they can present links to web pages which are very likely to answer the query for you too.
That is the reason smaller search engines (Bing), and privacy search engines (DDG), will never get as good as Google. Without data to answer the above question, they will never get as good results.
I've been finding the opposite - where they are too clickable...
Depending on which Google version loads, sometimes the green URL displayed under the blue title is also clickable. You expect hyperlinks on the WWW to be blue and underlined, so when some green text with no underline is also a link, it can be misleading.
Keep an eye out for the cursor changing to a hand, which sounds like a piece of advice from the 1990's!
Yes, I'm experiencing the same thing! I recently switched to Brave beta, and thought maybe it was something there, but I opened up Chrome for another task and was hit with the same issue.
I've got a couple common extensions running between the two, with uBlock Origin being my most likely culprit if it's an extension thing, but it's definitely annoying! Don't know why it's going on.
But dragging or middle click to a new tab is following the link. This looks a lot an issue between the numerous javascript trackers and my browser ad blocker. But no.
No clicking problems on Linux. However I have noticed (not sure how recent this is) that Google is NOT redirecting the results with Google urls anymore! which is good news.
Happens to me too all the time. I've noticed it usually happens when I click near the bottom of the link. But it may just be the drag sensitivity. Highly annoying.
yep. then i realized it’s not just google search results. that’s just most obvious case.if i click very carefully it works first click.
so my working theory is that drag sensitivity has increased. so a sloppy 1 pixel click-drag used to be a click but now it’s an imperceptible drag. i haven’t got up the motivation yet to audit a mouse event log.
Google is fully capable of providing excellent results. Today they'd rather please governments, media cartels, and biased employees. Google can get away with this because they aren't hurting for money. Search quality is no longer a priority. Google will treat you like a horse with blinders, or like a small child. Google would rather you not decide things for yourself.
Duckduckgo and Bing are decent. Both may seem wonderful if you now try them, but really you've just been getting accustomed to declining quality from Google.