Ethan Marcotte now blogs at Unstoppable Robot Ninja.

Weblog entry:

Googlocracy?

Maybe I’m late to the party, and everyone’s already noticed this, but:

  1. Search for something on Google (let’s say sidesh0w, ‘cause I’m that kind of egoist).
  2. Put your mouse cursor over any one of the search results.
  3. Take a look at your status bar (at the bottom of your browser window) — you should see a URI that looks something like http://www.google.com/url?q=[the search result’s address]&e=[XXXX], where XXXX is a user identifier that’ll persist across all of your searches.

Has Google started tracking outgoing links? More importantly, I’m not sure I like that they’re tracking mine.

Is this old news? If so, please let me know; I’d love to learn more about why they’ve started doing this.

Update: Well, this only seems to be happening on my Windows installation of Mozilla Firebird; I can’t replicate this on any other browser on Windows or Mac. Weird.

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