It's primarily relevant because it makes scraping search results much more expensive, solidifying Google's effective monopoly on Internet search.

Google has previously tried to prevent scraping of search results using legal means, but courts correctly think that scraping of Google's search results should be legal, just as Google's scraping of the whole Internet is legal. This is Google's reaction to that.

Well just as a regular user, I think it is pretty annoying because if I look up anything on Google while in Incognito Mode and hover over a search result, I can see that maybe the top result is maybe Wikipedia, or Instagram, or some other less-known website depending on what I'm searching for. Now, that's all very obfuscated because I don't actually know where I'm going to land for sure.

Tracking. Tied to use account, length of stay, how many reclixks, etc for marketing by/ads and surveillance.

They were already tracking everything you click but for example if you want to send a link to someone you can't copy the link from the Google result and send it to them, you'd either send them the Google tracking link or go to the website yourself.

If you make money trying to resell Google's free services and data, this is a disaster.

As a regular user, it's a minor annoyance.

it sounds like it primarily matters if you are a customer of this company, one that is building a search index off of urls scrapably hardcoded (or at least so as to be easily unencodable in non-realtime, it sounds like?) inside google search result redirects. in theory, there could be noticeable consumer user impact, but ... it would have to be a pretty large theory

The security implications of this are very severe when you consider the amount of people who google government websites, banking, crypto and others. And google will happily serve you a phishing website either in ads or results.

It's to make it more difficult for scrapers. Google have been able to do all the tracking they've wanted for decades.

Think about it: if you want to set up something like jina.ai you need to build your own index or piggyback on Google. My guess is they use residential proxies to fire requests to Google then scrape the URLs.

Opaque URLs now give Google another gateway to detect circumvention of their anti-bot controls, helping them monetise their search index rather than allowing providers like jina.ai to succeed.

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It should be obvious, they are doing this for a reason to benefit themselves.

As others have elaborated, the reasons are so they can track who you are and sell your profile advertising.