About a week or two ago, I started noticing that I could no longer copy the clean links for search result hits on Google. I thought it was maybe some quirk of a browser I was using, but today when trying to copy a link to a Youtube video, I realized it was actually rolled out globally (it seems).
Basically instead of getting a
https://youtube/. com/watch?v=-ed6UeDp1ek link now through google, (spaced out link to avoid AutoMod)
you will get
https://www.google.com/goto?url=CAES<rest-of-encrypted-blob-containing--versionByte-keyID-cipherText>
The article describes the change in technical detail, and mentions a fix, but the author has kept it private for now so Google doesn't patch it up (like they probably will or have for this workaround relying on the "Translate Page" feature with a different Browser Language selection [Twitter Link, Aug 27]).
Why it will probably be patched:
Surprised there's no post about it here already.
Only Hackernews article I could find (4 days ago):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49506338
Edit: It seems to matter a lot whether your network is deemed "spammy" or problematic by Google for the encrypted URLs to kick in, even if you're logged out. Funnily enough my google searches went back to normal a few hours after I posted this. So a logged out session might get the regular, unencrypted links if your IP network has a good rating on Google's end. Mine often runs into captchas and the like, so it makes sense why I'd be targeted by this new change.
Then again, I just tested on my mobile cellular on a logged out search, and I still have the goto's. Can't really control that.
I just tried a test search with Qwant and Startpage. On mobile they returned the exact same results (which were good), which suggests that Startpage is using Qwant there. On desktop though, Startpage was hot garbage. Not a single relevant result on page one, with nearly half being links to Facebook and Instagram. Hard pass on that.
I tested this on mobile too. Opened a Firefox private browsing window, switched to desktop mode and tried the search term on Startpage again. Same trash results as desktop. It's like they're actively telling desktop users to piss off.