This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Obie Fernandez. Original Post: Sneaky Google Link Tracking Feed Title: Obie On Rails (Has It Been 9 Years Already?) Feed URL: http://jroller.com/obie/feed/entries/rss Feed Description: Obie Fernandez talks about life as a technologist, mostly as ramblings about software development and consulting. Nowadays it's pretty much all about Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Obie Fernandez Latest Posts From Obie On Rails (Has It Been 9 Years Already?)

Anyone else noticed that Google is tracking when you click on search results? The sneakiness is in how their anchors behave. They have the normal HREF attribute, so when you mouse over the link you see the target URL normally in the status bar. However, those anchors also have a mousedown event handler that invokes the following Javascript function:

function rwt(el,cd,sg) {
   el.href="/url?sa=U&start="+escape(cd)+"&q="+escape(el.href).replace(/\+/g,"%2B")+"&ei=JMbcQta2DtCYQbWzqLII"+sg;
   el.onmousedown="";
   return true;
}

I don't think it is bad that they do that and I'm even thinking that a similar scheme could enable tracking outbound links in other web applications. For example, in Rails all URLs can/should be generated dynamically and a simple parameter could tag the links to be rewritten with a similar scheme that hit a redirect action, recording the user's outbound traversal.