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Finally, Google has done it: They've made a fundamental change to their search results that could drive me, and a host of other bloggers, to rival search engines. If you blog, you know the routine: Looking for a relevant link, I type a few keywords into Google, and copy and paste the link into a post. More often than not, it's a link to a page I've already visited, so there's no need to click through to the page. Except that now, Google is forcing me to click through; instead of displaying a copy-and-paste friendly link, Google's using awkward redirects that look like this:


http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=2&url=http%3A%2F%2Fvalleywag.com%2F
&ei=kQAMR8PnDYOUhAOdnKmpCA&usg=AFQjCNEGslPHCC3aESl9W_mk0seYql8QMg&sig2
=JlU7uV-b_Gj7SFpRsVZ0jQ

The redirects, presumably, help Google better track click-throughs. And perhaps they will, eventually, make Google's search results better. But they sure don't help me use Google to blog. Collecting data while interfering with the user experience? Why, that seems ever so slightly ... evil. Yahoo, too, uses these maddening redirects. And a redirect-free search engine? Why, surprisingly, Microsoft's Live.com. Imagine that: The Beast of Redmond, in search, proves the least evil of them all. Update: Google apparently does this trick only when you're signed into its services. So this isn't evil as much as its stupid — providing users with the strongest incentive possible not to sign in. (Illustration by Aniceweb)