Notes on tech

Update: Seems that Google does that URL trick, only when you right click on the URL. So if you just hover the mouse over the URL text, the status bar shows the original URL. But if you do a right click on that URL and then look at the status bar, it will show you the modified URL.

Since a past few days, I've noticed that sometimes Google's search result page contains links back to its own server and the actual site URL, the one that matched my search, is added as a parameter to it. It seems that they might be tracking user clicks to bump up the relevancy ratings for sites that users click on. What could be better than making use of human intelligence and filtering capability of end-users?

Here is Google's URL:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=3&
url=http%3A//www.ypjain.com/anand/2005/07/google-adsense-nonsense.html&ei=_LH8QtKEJJCaYNqQiJgN

Yahoo follows a similar strategy (though, I think Yahoo has been doing this since a long time). Here is a sample Yahoo URL:
http://rds.yahoo.com/S=2766679/K=anand+jain/v=2/SID=e/TID=DFX5_30/l=WS1/R=1/IPC=us/SHE=0/H=0/
;_ylt=Ao_kXzv0Wcma3vH4HFCQd6RXNyoA/SIG=11fl7bouv/EXP=1123909414/*-http%3A//www.ypjain.com/anand

This is the result URL that I see when I search for my own name. The rds.yahoo.com is a Yahoo redirection server. So, when an end user clicks on a search result URL, the metric is recorded by Yahoo and then the user is instantenously forwarded to the actual destination.

MSN search hasnt figured out this secret sauce yet. They just directly list the actual URL's and send the user on his/her way. Maybe thats the reason they are still a distant number three in this hot race.

Relevancy is all that matters in search. Yahoo and Google let the users figure out what is relevant or not and use than data to build a better search engine.