alt Hacker News> 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.
Replies
duskdozer • yesterday at 8:58 AM
It benefits on the other end, if I share the link and you click on it, Google knows you got it from me and from where. People 100% don't click through to share original URLs.
The fact they can track which link you clicked on is extremely valuable. For example by examining search queries and knowing which link you tried last, google can get a better idea of what is of interest and value to a user.