1. It adds extra latency due to an extra hop.

2. It is non-bypassable tracking of every single click.

3. It does not allow you to inspect the URL to see where it goes to before visiting.

4. It breaks the feedback signal of extensions which redirect sites. E.g. Fandom wikis are shit so I have them redirected to equivalent much better wikis like. But now any such redirection has to be done post-click tracking meaning Google still believes I want to see the Fandom site.

5. It breaks extensions which hide certain shit search results based on URL.

It's rather frustrating that after they crawled my website to use for their AI without my consent, and using that AI to slowly strangle my traffic, they're not happy that _other people_ are doing the same to them.

It breaks the social contract of the web. My user agent should be able to tell me where a hyperlink goes without first clicking on it, and perhaps act differently based on that information.

Now, all Google search results appear to go back to Google.

For me it's annoying that I cannot right-click the link and copy the actual target. They are breaking the web.

Aside from the list of current concerns that others have covered well...Google is very good at "boiling frogs". That is, rolling out unpopular things in phases.

This could be, for example, step one in the return of AMP, but with a new twist. Where google conveniently returns the content of your website, without directly sending the user to your website. With whatever changes it chooses to make.

Privacy-wise, it enables them to track the result you click on.

Also, though more niche, it would make archived search result pages (e.g. on the Wayback Machine) less useful.

Personally, I put a lot of effort into writing my blog posts, some of which have been really well viewed by humans. While mine is effectively a "hobbyist" site, it's nice when readers look at other blog posts as a result of reading the original one. Google's approach ensures that readers get a very narrow view of my content, so everybody expect Google loses out.

Aside from the privacy concerns and inconveniences this brings to Google users, it matters for users (of services) that rely on SerpApi too. Kagi for example has started showing these goto URLs in search results.

Yeah. I might be wrong but I think they only served direct links for a relatively short time in their history, early on in the 90's and in recent years with ping, which they used to track clicks anyway. At least half of their history they used either the 302 redirects or onmousedown link rewriting (which was terrible). And I'm not even starting on AMP.

In this case they assume correctly that it is enshitification. A search engine, that doesn't understand what hypertext and the web are supposed to be is shit. There are no good reasons to not have proper links. Whoever creates such websites is having other motives or doesn't know good web development. In the case of Google employees I have to assume the former. They are not acting in the best interest of the users, and therefore enshitify Google search.

Well, I hope ultimately this will lead to even more user loss for them. Fortunately, I myself don't have to suffer due to it, because I degooglified my life.

Well, for one it breaks right click and copy link location.

It's not exactly the same: when in hover over a link, I want to know where it's taking me. I want to know if the URL is pointing to a safe domain.

Google being the cesspool it is, can serve whichever (ad laden) domain that fits their own interests the best.

This is yet another move to remove power from the users.