this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2026
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8
google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update (www.autom.dev)
submitted 3 days ago by unglueclass23@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] lambisio@feddit.cl 1 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

Eh. DDG and other search engines exist, and all Google has gained is that the entire rest of the search world (as well as button makers, context link creators, RSS, bookmarkers etc) have to drop them because the URLs don't actually resolve to results and are indistinguishable from phishing functionally speaking; meaning Google won't even get people's search results by proxy now.

Now, if all other big search providers do this and engines like DDG have to drop them, we'll reach a new golden age, where new and more ethical search providers can enter the playfield and start without a big disadvantage.

[–] mschae@discuss.mschae23.de 21 points 3 days ago (2 children)

The real URL is in the Location header on /goto. Request that URL. Do not follow the redirect.

…but that's how you follow a redirect?

[–] eleijeep@piefed.social 18 points 2 days ago

You're right, and this article is spouting nonsense. If you have to request the /goto link in order to get the URL then you've already been tracked by Google (or blocked if they think you're a scraper), and following the Location header is exactly what your browser would do anyway. That's how HTTP redirects work.

This article is from a company that offers APIs to just proxy Google search results, so they're exactly the kind of people that Google is trying to block with this change. Reading some other posts on their site (eg. the one that explains how to follow the Location header) there are obvious signs of slop, so this whole article is probably an AI hallucination.

[–] nyan@lemmy.cafe -4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

One is under your control. The other is being passed through a script on the server that may be doing who-knows-what in addition to redirecting you.

(Better if you just drop Google altogether.)

[–] mschae@discuss.mschae23.de 6 points 2 days ago

No? If you want to resolve this URI, you have to follow the redirect, there's no way around it. Requesting it from google and looking at the Location header is following the redirect.

I mean, I agree that one should drop google and that this is probably just another thing they do to track people, but that's not what I meant with that comment.

[–] greyscale@lemmy.grey.ooo 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Can someone just "distillation attack" google search so I can just use the derived data instead of giving them all my click tracking?

[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

No. But you can use alternative search engines, or frontends like searxng that won't send your clicks to Google (while they still work, anyway, this change might break them)

[–] greyscale@lemmy.grey.ooo 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'd rather just have the original dataset.

That's the thing they've built the moat around.

[–] ChaosMonkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 days ago

You could build a browser extension to extract search results but the infrastructure will probably be expensive.