Comment on Tell HN: Google Search to begin using opaque redirect URLs on search resultsComments−AznHisoka16dMy guess is to combat scrapers. They have been suing companies that scrape Google lately (they lost a recent one)−hurfdurf16dThe clear URLs are still in the site's source, though.−AznHisoka16dThat is an additional step for people who want to buy the scraped data though. They have to crawl the actual URLs to see what it points to−explorazOP16d... for some reason (inside a script tag for me)It never got overwritten back to the original destination URL with the same browsing environment (see my other comment).
Comments
My guess is to combat scrapers. They have been suing companies that scrape Google lately (they lost a recent one)
The clear URLs are still in the site's source, though.
That is an additional step for people who want to buy the scraped data though. They have to crawl the actual URLs to see what it points to
... for some reason (inside a script tag for me)
It never got overwritten back to the original destination URL with the same browsing environment (see my other comment).