A few minutes ago I wanted to find something I’d written about privacy. So I started with a simple search on Google:
The result was this:
Which is a very very very very very very very very very very very very very way long way of saying this:
https://google.com/search?&q=doc+searls+privacy
That’s 609 characters vs. 47, or about 13 times longer. (Hence the word “very” repeated 13 times, above.)
Why are search URLs so long these days? The didn’t used to be.
I assume that the 562 extra characters in that long url tell Google more about me and what I’m doing than they used to want to know. In old long-URL search results, there was human-readable stuff there about the computer and the browser being used. This mess surely contains the same, plus lots of personal data about me and what I’m doing online in addition to searching for this one thing. But I don’t know. And that’s surely part of the idea here.
This much, however, is easy for a human to read:
- Giant URLs like this are cyphers, on purpose.
- You’re not supposed to know what they actually say. Only Google should know.
- There is a lot about your searches that are Google’s business and not yours.
- Google has lost interest (if it ever had any) in making search result URLs easy to copy and use somewhere else, such as in a post like this.
Bing is better in this regard. Here’s the same search result there:
That’s 101 characters, or less than 1/6th of Google’s.
The de-crufted URL is also shorter:
https://bing.com/search?q=doc+searls+privacy
Just 44 characters.
So here is a suggestion for both companies: make search results available with one click in their basic forms. That will make sharing those URLs a lot easier to do, and create good will as well. And, Google, if a cruft-less URL is harder for you to track, so what? Maybe you shouldn’t be doing some of this tracking in the first place.
Sometimes it’s better to make things easy for people than harder. This is one of those times. Or billions of them.
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