Can someone explain why this matters? Not being flippant I just don’t understand why this would be important.

InsideOutSanta 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's primarily relevant because it makes scraping search results much more expensive, solidifying Google's effective monopoly on Internet search.

Google has previously tried to prevent scraping of search results using legal means, but courts correctly think that scraping of Google's search results should be legal, just as Google's scraping of the whole Internet is legal. This is Google's reaction to that.

	▲	leobg an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This is the best explanation. They’ve been doing the same in Google News. Each entry comes not with a URL to the source, but with a hash. To resolve it, you must send requests to Google’s servers. Anyone who wants to create a list of URLs of sources automatically can therefore be blocked by Google now on two levels rather than one - the search for a list of results, and identifying the source URL for each result. In effect, they’re removing attribution from the content they quote from other people’s websites. It would be interesting to see if courts object to that. It is one thing to crawl other people’s websites and display snippets of their work as your search results when each result is properly and transparently attributed. But if the text is quoted and the source is not there alongside it in plaintext, replaced only by a vague promise that, if you ask, we may or may not tell you where this piece of content is from, that is a very different deal.
	▲	what 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You can opt out from Google scraping you though? In theory you can opt out of anyone scraping you (if people were well behaved). Google should get to opt out of being scraped too.

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layman51 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well just as a regular user, I think it is pretty annoying because if I look up anything on Google while in Incognito Mode and hover over a search result, I can see that maybe the top result is maybe Wikipedia, or Instagram, or some other less-known website depending on what I'm searching for. Now, that's all very obfuscated because I don't actually know where I'm going to land for sure.

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rootsudo 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Tracking. Tied to use account, length of stay, how many reclixks, etc for marketing by/ads and surveillance.

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demibabs 3 hours ago | parent [-]

But what’s stopping Google from doing this already?

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1e1a 3 hours ago | parent [-]

JavaScript being disabled - Google was already sending analytics pings when search result links were clicked on, using JS.

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kalleboo an hour ago | parent | next [-]

<a ping=""> works without JS in Chrome and Safari (but not Firefox) https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLAnchorE...

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demibabs 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

JavaScript is required to use Google search at all, no?

	▲	1e1a an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Oh that is true, I forgot they changed that.

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Cider9986 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It doesn't work without JS though.

	▲	an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		[deleted]
	▲	googapologist 43 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Pings are blockable in Firefox and so are the event analytics requests triggered by Google's on-page JavaScript.

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Cider9986 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They were already tracking everything you click but for example if you want to send a link to someone you can't copy the link from the Google result and send it to them, you'd either send them the Google tracking link or go to the website yourself.

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0gs 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

it sounds like it primarily matters if you are a customer of this company, one that is building a search index off of urls scrapably hardcoded (or at least so as to be easily unencodable in non-realtime, it sounds like?) inside google search result redirects. in theory, there could be noticeable consumer user impact, but ... it would have to be a pretty large theory

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csomar 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The security implications of this are very severe when you consider the amount of people who google government websites, banking, crypto and others. And google will happily serve you a phishing website either in ads or results.

	▲	demibabs 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Can you elaborate?
	▲	3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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dd8601fn 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[flagged]

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MiroslavPokorny 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It should be obvious, they are doing this for a reason to benefit themselves.

As others have elaborated, the reasons are so they can track who you are and sell your profile advertising.

	▲	demibabs 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> the reasons are so they can track who you are and sell your profile advertising. What? Like they weren’t doing this before? Obviously Google’s telemetry is tracking every link you click regardless; there’s no extra tracking benefit to this. The reason they’re doing this seems to be to stop competitors from scraping their search results.