{"id":664,"date":"2011-11-06T11:43:24","date_gmt":"2011-11-06T19:43:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ussherpress.com\/blog\/?p=664"},"modified":"2017-03-08T20:10:06","modified_gmt":"2017-03-09T04:10:06","slug":"how-to-stop-google-from-tracking-your-clicks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ussherpress.com\/blog\/?p=664","title":{"rendered":"How to stop Google from tracking your clicks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Every time you search on google.com and click on one of the results, Google records that click. They&#8217;ve likely been doing this for a while, but I&#8217;ve only really started noticing it lately because their redirect servers are oftentimes slow, so you can actually see the hand-over happening.<\/p>\n<p>Google is pretty clever about hiding the fact that they are recording the clicks by presenting a different URL when you hover over the a search result. Try this: do a search on google.com and hover over one of the results.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a rel=\"attachment wp-att-666\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ussherpress.com\/blog\/?attachment_id=666\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-666\" title=\"Hover\" src=\"https:\/\/www.ussherpress.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Hover.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"530\" height=\"248\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.ussherpress.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Hover.jpg 883w, https:\/\/www.ussherpress.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Hover-300x140.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 530px) 100vw, 530px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Look at the bottom of your window and see what the link&#8217;s URL is. Hey, looks okay, right? Google isn&#8217;t redirecting you to one of their servers or anything, right? Well, try clicking on the mouse, but don&#8217;t release the mouse button yet. Now look at the status bar:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a rel=\"attachment wp-att-665\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ussherpress.com\/blog\/?attachment_id=665\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-665\" title=\"Click\" src=\"https:\/\/www.ussherpress.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Click.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"530\" height=\"248\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.ussherpress.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Click.jpg 883w, https:\/\/www.ussherpress.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Click-300x140.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 530px) 100vw, 530px\" \/><\/a><br \/>\n(This works on Firefox. I&#8217;m not sure how it appears on other browsers.)<\/p>\n<p>Aha, the browser reveals the truth. What&#8217;s happening is Google is taking you to another site to record this click, then sending you to the real site. There&#8217;s two reasons why this is annoying: 1) privacy and 2) it slows down your browsing experience. I&#8217;m not really going to discuss the privacy issues here. If you don&#8217;t mind Google tracking your clicks (perhaps because they are providing you a free service), that&#8217;s fine. However, from a pragmatic point of view, it does slow down your browsing experience.<\/p>\n<p>So how do you turn it off? I&#8217;ve discovered a quick way: use <a href=\"https:\/\/ssl.scroogle.org\/\">Scroogle<\/a>. Scroogle provides a way to do searches on Google anonymously and doesn&#8217;t track your clicks. If you are using Firefox and like to use the search field in the top-right corner of your window, you can install a Scroogle search plugin from <a href=\"https:\/\/addons.mozilla.org\/en-US\/firefox\/addon\/scroogle-ssl-search\/?src=search\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m going to round up some other ways of bypassing search tracking and will post them here when I get more info. In the meantime, here are some more posts about this issue from other bloggers:<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/cybernetnews.com\/how-to-stop-google-yahoo-bing-from-tracking-your-clicks\/\">How to Stop Google, Yahoo &#038; Bing from Tracking Your Clicks<\/a><br \/>\n&#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/tech-policy\/news\/2010\/03\/google-keeps-your-data-to-learn-from-good-guys-fight-off-bad-guys.ars\">Why Google keeps your data forever, tracks you with ads<\/a><br \/>\n&#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/lifehacker.com\/5843969\/facebook-is-tracking-your-every-move-on-the-web-heres-how-to-stop-it\">Facebook Is Tracking Your Every Move on the Web; Here\u2019s How to Stop It<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Every time you search on google.com and click on one of the results, Google records that click. They&#8217;ve likely been doing this for a while, but I&#8217;ve only really started noticing it lately because their redirect servers are oftentimes slow, so you can actually see the hand-over happening. Google is pretty clever about hiding the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ussherpress.com\/blog\/?p=664\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">How to stop Google from tracking your clicks<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[138],"tags":[40,73],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ussherpress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ussherpress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ussherpress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ussherpress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ussherpress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=664"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.ussherpress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":683,"href":"https:\/\/www.ussherpress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664\/revisions\/683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ussherpress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ussherpress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ussherpress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}