Slashdot Mirror
Is the Web Heading Toward Redirect Hell?
Ant snips from Royal Pingdom this excerpt: "Google is doing it. Facebook is doing it. Yahoo is doing it. Microsoft is doing it. And soon Twitter will be doing it. We're talking about the apparent need of every web service out there to add intermediate steps to sample what we click on before they send us on to our real destination. This has been going on for a long time and is slowly starting to build into something of a redirect hell on the Web. And it has a price."
Funny just this morning I noticed that it took at least 5 redirects or more for Google to let me login to Analytics. It felt like my browser had a life of its own!
The real problem though are the link shorteners. I'd like to vote with my feet and never click on them, but for many, they are like drugs, because they let you track your influence (how many people clicked) in real-time. It's especially bad on slower connections such as smartphones. Not everyone has 1MB/s.
Any ideas on how to convince people to stop?
--
Don't work on your startup project without a safety net
This is what happens when advertising and privacy are not regulated. You can blame the US for a lack of privacy laws.
I reached this article from Twitter, via this URL: http://bit.ly/cTGasX
I refuse to click on any "shortened" link, because I want to know PRECISELY where I'm going to end up. Thank you Slashdot and goatse.cx. If it's important enough to go visit, it's important enough to spell out properly. And thank you, but I don't live my life via SMS, so the few extra characters is worth my piece of mind.
You mean like this?
For those of us who use things like NoScript, the price can be that we don't get there. Ever.
I know that when I go to a site that can't work unless I allow a half dozen or more other sites to run scripts, I sometimes decide that it's not worth my time. When I click a link that then has to contact several domains, (sometimes ones I have specifically blocked) I might stop right there and close the tab.
The web isn't just headed towards redirect hell - it's turning into a damn sketchy web of tentacles working their way into every page. When I find ones that I'm not comfortable having around, I don't go back.
I'm not sure I like what the web has become. Thanks to NoScript, I at least know what it's become.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
I've actually begun to just highlight the URL, right click and pick "go to www.pornpornporn.com"... for example.
Because google's redirect is pretty laggy at times.
Folks at linuxtoday.com have been doing this for a long time. It's one reason I fled the site. Instead of taking me to where I wanna go directly, they make me click twice on the same site. This I believe, enables them to collect 'vital information' to present to their advertisers.
The bad thing is that they lost me and many others in the process.
By the way, it's intentional for me not to link to them from Slashdot directly.
... so they had to find yet another way to slow things down... so the web could live up to its reputation of "world wide wait" ;)
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
[Wait 30 seconds or click here to skip to comment]
Speaking of redirects how about websites waiting to load content on Doubleclick analytics? Not only do the ads you're serving not load up but I tend to give up on visiting the page altogether. Everybody loses.
The Optimize Google add-in for Firefox gets rid of some of their hellish redirects. Sadly, it doesn't update frequently and seems prone to breaking.
I want to create a redirect loop. Just imagine, google to tinyurl to bit.ly to dilv.it back to google.
Or you could always just make a really long way to get to someone who'll never give you up, never let you down.
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
Google, for example, generate a direct link to the site, while JS on the page quietly tries to report the click to Google before the new page has loaded. Sometimes it succeeds, sometimes not, but it's worth the data loss to avoid hampering the user.
If someone is paying me for the clicks I send to their site, I need to count it so that I know how much I should charge, and they need to count it as well to know I'm not lying. They could make the count on the destination page, but usually it's far more easy to make a special service for it.
A redirect page is usually just a couple of hundred bytes large. Cookies might add some clutter, but probably still less than 1k in each direction, still fits in a single packet. I don't see the problem here.
Google and Facebook both use these "intermediate steps" to weed out malware infested sites and warn the user. Sampling can also be useful in judging if something is NSFW, or more importantly, rickrolling prevention.
I obviously cannot speak to all situations. But for my organization this is kind of required simply for ease of maintenance (on our end) and ease of use (on the client end).
When a user logs into one of our sites, they must select a database to connect to. The actual URLs are something like: "https://www2.businessdomain.net/scripts/cgiip.exe/WService=wcustomers71/seplog01.w". Each URL is slightly different to allow for different connections. There are hundreds of possible connections. The user then has two choices: memorize that beast URL, or save it as a bookmark. The latter seem to make sense.
But that's where the ease of maintenance comes into play. If a server or database goes down, we steer the traffic to a temp server. When we do, the landing URL changes to reflect the new locations, broker name, and database string. Typically we would have to broadcast the new, temporary URL to the customers' employees (and then broadcast another one when it was available again). So bookmarking the landing URL is not really a good idea for the customers as sometime it will go no where (or worse go to a failing database).
Hence, we have a shorter URL (unique to each customer) redirect to whatever landing URL they should be connected to. It's easy to remember and easy to maintain. Something like: "yourconnection.businessdomain.net".
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Jeff Atwood hit on this issue in a blog post last year: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/06/url-shorteners-destroying-the-web-since-2002.html
Insert Sig Here
This used to be considered something that was potentially a Good Thing. To help prevent link rot and redesigns from breaking links, people thinking a lot about Hypertext came up with initiatives like PURL's: http://purl.oclc.org/docs/
Now that the primary usage of these redirects are simply to shorten links to something more convenient, we're using the same tech (a 301) and using it in different ways. One question is, how many people use the "custom link name" feature of tinyurl.com vs, simply let a random string of text be used? And, will a service start letting us update link destinations after the fact (like the original purl site did)? If so, how do you prevent nefarious uses of this (like moving it to goatse after it's memeing about)?
In terms of the filtration-for-tracking-purposes? That horse has left the barn already; I'm more concerned with final destinations not being recorded over time for posterity. These redirect services are totally interchangable anyway... as soon as one starts using interstitals, people will move to another one.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Less fragile and less of an unnecessary intermediary on this Web 2.0 (or whatever) age would be to catch the click of a link with onclick, set a cookie, and open the original, intended link. When user would again come back to the site, this cookie would be dumped to the site that so much wanted the information it was clicked. Even if the user would have some sort of embedded resource from this site open somewhere else, it could harvest the information and send it back.
Instead, we seem to be ending up with endless chains of redirectors and opaque identifiers that are bound to organizations that don't necessarily exist in a year. What a joy to use technology which is driven by needs of utter morons and greed of those interested to press most information out of the morons...
and there is no useful (i.e. non-light-entertainment) content created primarily through advertising revenue. Slashdot developers who have made their money over the last decade producing tat by not overestimating the intelligence of the general public cannot bear to admit this, but you simply cannot produce high-calibre content when your primary aim is to suck in as many as possible of the kind of people who take notice of adverts.
Murdoch, often maligned for his lack of business sense but mysteriously still richer than all of us, seems to have tried and failed at pushing the subscription model. Obviously there are other viable models for producing information on the web such as government sponsorship (BBC, academia) and well organised groups of hobbyists (e.g. ham radio), but how will the sites who do not already have a dedicated subscription base through off-line heritage sustain themselves? Or maybe the answer is that they will not, the moment they take their eye off the advertiser as customer and start worrying directly about satisfying the desire for the reader to intellectually advance himself.
Not only do you not know where you're going to end up, but also the service can track your behaviour. Obviously this latter reason is why all the companies want to do it.
So, how do you get around it? I don't even think we can. I think we're screwed, to be honest. It's just going to be like that, perhaps until the day an exploit comes out and re-targets all of a services re-directs (i.e. tinyurl) to some hostile domain. Then, and perhaps only then, would it get enough attention to bring it to the "mainstream" users that it might be a bad idea.
Not.. that I'm suggesting anything... 4chan.
I didn't even know this was occurring. Guess it hasn't bothered me so far.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
To play the devil's advocate - facebook's redirects started as a way to filter out all the spam links.
As I commented on TFA:
So we have jQuery, and we have AJAX. Why don’t they just attach an onClick to their links that sends a quick POST to Google before sending the user on their way, directly to the site in question? It won’t work for people without Javascript on, but that’s such a small percentage that I doubt it matters to them much. The important thing is that they could get their statistics, while still avoiding a redirect. The service providers could argue that they need the tracking even if Javascript is off, but that just seems extreme.
Can someone tell me if there are any issues I'm not seeing with this approach?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
(ok, RDR is not that good, but it helps, and I'm sure as this becomes even more prevalent, people will work around it)
Redirects are a problem only because browser makers let it be a problem. If you hit "back" and it goes to a 302 page, it should go back again, until it gets somewhere without a 302.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
As if that's not bad enough, then they script the mouseover event to display the direct URL on the browser status bar, obviously to hide that they're tracking you.
Google started doing this some time ago. It's annoying. I cut and paste the actual URL because I don't feel like Google needs to know what sites I'm visiting.
There's a Mozilla plugin to circumvent this but I don't remember the name of it.
On the other side of this are the search engines. They may not follow the chain of links, especially if it involves "cookies". So a reference that uses a redirection service may not be credited as an inbound link for ranking purposes.
Then there's the firewall/proxy issue. Firewalls need to see where you're really going, so they have to run down the link chain. This may result in bogus hits on the end site, if both the firewall and the browser separately do this.
Oh dear God yes! We can abuse JavaScript more to get more clicks!
Redirects are a minor inconvenience on the net. Much more insidious is the enormous number of sites that have to be accessed to get all the content on many webpages. Add to that the layers and layers of CSS needed to render them. And the massive, often buggy stack of scripts they bring. Not to mention the server-side scripting that slows down fetching the pages and embedded content and CSS pages and scripts before you get them.
It'd be interesting to see the average number of bytes transacted to render one byte of information to the screen. And the average loading time of a page.
http://tinyurl.com/8t5
This page has lot of information on our article
when it was considered a security hole if you DIDN'T use a redirect on your page? IIRC there used to be an attack vector where malicous sites used links from freemail pages to steel session IDs from the referer-headers.
bickerdyke
I think we could just write a Java program that will loop through a range of your top 10 urls every minute. Then you would never have to click. Call it autoBrowser. Because no one should actually click on things.
those tinyurl makes archives mailing lists hell also, have anyone seen or code a tool automatic lookup the real url and replace the tinyurl for archival purposes ?
Accused by a site that is dependent on scripts coming from other domains.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Doesn't HTML 5 have a feature that makes this no longer necessary?
A post-back of sorts, wherein (for example) Google uses a direct link to the search result. The link contains a property that says "Let Google know you just clicked this link".
"Redirect hell" is a hacky workaround to do exactly what this HTML 5 feature is intended for.
It has the added benefit of letting you turn off this behavior in the browser. But for precisely this reason, I can imagine the big boys who rely on this data (Google, Facebook, etc) continuing to use the old redirect methods.
links you to Jap Porn.
New Economic Perspectives
I'm going to assume that most of these use HTTP redirects. This is where the server returns a 3xx result that tells the browser where to go, as opposed to rendering a full page and using Javascript to redirect.
The nice thing about HTTP redirects is that a service like Twitter can just follow the HTTP redirects for you and cut all of the middlemen out of the chain. Even forthcoming server-side Javascript interpreters could parse out Javascript-based redirects.
No, I will not work for your startup
Anytime I'm on a website, and I go to my iGoogle homepage, and then try and click back, it re-redirects me back to iGoogle. I have to hammer the back button about five times to get it to go back to the site I was at before.
Redirects can be used in a variety of ways that don't automatically translate into a tracking scheme by a company. Regardless, tracking is 100% absolute necessity for the internet's survival. With no ability to market, no money would exchange hands and the internet would have died and faded as a fad 15 years ago. Don't tell me independent organizations would have kept it going cause thats BS. The main supporters of these independant orgs are companies that make money from the internet. So please stfu in advance. If youre really pissed about so many redirects, challenge the core of the problem: the HTTP protocol and the ridiculous amount of technologies that it takes to run web based applications.
This is the price we pay for using all of these "services" at no direct cost to ourselves. Something has to pay for all of the infrastructure, developers, support, etc from Twiter / Facebook / Google / etc.
Take a look at http://flattr.com/. I think micropayment methods like this might become the way of supporting content that you really care for on the web.
I love how after this was posted, facebook is down. I wonder
“Google are doing it. Facebook are doing it. Yahoo are doing it. Microsoft are doing it. And soon, Twitter will do it”
Personally, I find the trend of redirecting to innocent sites via shady URL's much more alarming: http://5z8.info/foodporn_e0g0l_taliban-meetup
(I promise I'll get modded "troll" by someone who glanced at the link and assumed the worst. Hard to blame them, but I do love using those links whenever possible...)
...is paved with redirections.
Dark Reflection
That's stupid. My browser does malware protection, I don't need Google or Facebook getting involved. And as @spazdor says, do that before presenting the link to me.
You're crazy if you think Google and Facebook intercept links for your benefit. They're doing it to track you, pure and simple.
At least I can infer their outbound links. Link shorteners are Russian roulette. If services like Twitter wanted a better user experience, they would unshorten links when they present a feed to browsers.
=S
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html
Yes you are really missing something! Just by viewing source you should notice on the a tag
onmousedown="return rwt(this,'','','','3','AFQjCNElSuk8pqYMVk5pKG9sycYfDSh7zg','UsteGasJKDRPW0uis7I9Ig','0CCsQFjAC')"
class="l"
href="http://example.com/the/original/URL"
So on mouseover you see the original URL, but on click, function rwt ("rewrite"?) sends you to Google first with all that tracking crap, which then redirects you on your way.
If I right-click and Copy Link Location, I get a Google URL in Firefox with this tracking crap. If I feed that to curl, I don't get a status 301 redirect, I get a small piece of HTML back containing both a script that changes the window.location and a meta http-equiv refresh tag.
Disable JavaScript to disable all this.
=S
Go indirectly to Hell. Do pass Go, and seven other affiliates. Do collect for us $200 in click-through money.
The enemies of Democracy are
View Thru extension
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jkncfnbcgbclefkbknfdbngiegdppgdd?hl=en
I'm pretty sure archive.org said at some point they'd take over URL shorteners which would go dead, so those billions of pests wouldn't all go 404 on our asses
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66355
When Googlebot indexes a page containing JavaScript, it will index that page but it cannot follow or index any links hidden in the JavaScript itself. Use of JavaScript is an entirely legitimate web practice. However, use of JavaScript with the intent to deceive search engines is not.
use loads of redirects - I have just spent several weeks testing on a big site 5M+ pages removing redirects with the real urls. Having to follow to many redirects is a good way of killing your site for search engines.
We even had to get our devs to go the extra mile and sort the underlying problems as they wanted to fix problems with redirects rather than fix the underlying problems.
That's the nature of things once a system matures. --The ______ Agenda [cafepress.com]
Is it ironic that I clicked on your tee shirt store link and with my NoScript running, could not view, shop for, nor purchase anything? In fact, it is impossible to leave the barren first page. Keep up the good work.
It would be trivial to do something with javascript - put an onclick handler that does an xmlHttpRequest to save the "needed" information without even needing to worry about header redirects and the like. The link can be something like
<a href="http://www.thesite.com/path/to/page.html" onclick="return notifyBigBrother(this);">
where notifyBigBrother() is a function that sends the click info to the search engine site. Why isn't this done?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
They get most of the major offenders in the list. Sure it breaks some links, but it's worth it.
As opposed to yourself, who writes retarded shitty front-ends for DOS commands in Delphi that could best be described as looking like a monkey's ass (and even there I'm being rather generous to you... if monkeys could read this they'd surely be offended by the comparison), gets butthurt when anyone dares to tell you how shitty they are, get butthurt when legitimate security firms audit your shit and conclude that it is little better than downright malware (in fact some of it WAS called malware), in fact get generally butthurt about just about any criticism of yourself in general, and obsessively follow people around in order to bitch at them if they dared to criticise you in the past. Impressive? Only impressively moronic... in short you're an all-around shining example of a wonderful person who should go die in a fire. kthxbye
apk says here he’s ‘BUSY AS HELL’:
FIRST: What gives you the idea I was stalking you? Buddy - I work, and am finishing off another degree: My days? Are actually BUSY AS HELL - I have things to do (make ca$h, AND, getting another bachelor's degree in CSC (A.A.S. part's done, 92 credits into the 120 towards the bachelors after this semester's done in fact, in CSC to go along with my MIS/B.S. Business too, both related & perfectly along what I do for a living for 16++ yrs. now professionally - Information Systems work (Databasing really)).
boy is that ever an understatement...
yes, apk is definitely BUSY AS HELL~:
#31581460 #31582722 #31582896 #31583030 #31583334 #31584042 #31584232 #31584570 #31585028 #31585182 #31599452 #31602524 #31603116 #31603522 #31609050 #31612540 #31612814 #31613160 #31618278 #31627354 #31703250 #31740066 #31740432 #31740880 #31743526 #31766346 #31766428 #31766442 #31766482 #31766528 #31766550 #31766590 #31766616 #31766658 #31766714 #31880668 #31880840 #31880878 #31880900 #31880932 #31880952 #31880980 #31880992 #31881052 #31881072 #31881086
...are those that come in perfectly legitimate email, stuff that I actively subscribed to. They already know where I came from, their own damned email. Why does it need to go through a redirecting clicktracker?
Furthermore, it lets even legit emails send me somewhere not only unanticipated but also a pain in the ass, like links that unexpectedly open a whopping great PDF.
Many thanks to folks who posted links to two URL de-obfuscator services, which are now permanently on my toolbar.
http://unshorten.com/index.php
http://www.longurlplease.com/
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
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http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/40582
Greasemonkey script with analogous function.
Despite the name, it works for things in addition to TinyURL.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Firefox was an early adopter of the <a ping> HTML 5 feature to solve exactly this redirect-for-tracking issue, added in early 2006: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=319368 There was huge controversy that the feature helped sites track users (never mind that you're being tracked as it is, and that the feature let you turn it off) and it was disabled before it ever shipped. We thus continue trudging through redirect hell when the browser could have been doing that for us in parallel while giving us the content we wanted.
The feature would have sold better if it was framed as <a shortcut> or <a dest>. That is, keep the historical href behavior jumping through redirects in old browsers, while new browsers could just load the final content directly from the shortcut (or dest) attribute and treat href as the ping. I'm sure that suggestion gives HTML purist fits on semantic grounds. At least it's backward compatible unlike ping which requires a site to choose between serving different content to old and new browsers, forgoing link tracking on old browsers (the majority? fat chance), or not supporting the feature at all (we have a winner!).
URL-shorteners are a different use-case altogether and not served by <a ping>
guoig
Even if browser makers complied with the limit, page designers would simply insert dummy pages with Javascript redirects into their redirect chains.
The real "overhead" for many, many Web sites now is the linking to fifty ad servers on every page - and THOSE servers are either down or slow, so they don't finish responding to the browser request in less than ten minutes.
Which is why your browser "busy" indicator stays that way even though the page appears to have been fully loaded - or worse, the page never loads.
This makes a difference when you try to save a page on your hard drive - that last little bit won't save and the browser will tell you the save "failed" - in reality you got most of it except for one lousy little ad.
All of this is just the effect of the Internet industry running on too little server horsepower and too little bandwidth - and WAY too little brains.
And yet people think they can run a business "in the cloud" - not with these morons running the cloud.
The reality is that the Internet is now as fast as an old monochrome green screen dumb terminal hooked up to a mainframe circa 1975 - except it's in color. You still spend a minute waiting for a Web page to load, no different than waiting for an overloaded mainframe to respond to a dumb terminal. And this despite the fact that the servers running a Web site are a thousand times more powerful than that 1970's mainframe.
And there may be an entire server FARM running that Web site - it's STILL slow. Because somebody else's server ISN'T.
As Woody Allen summed up the human situation, "Nothing works and nobody cares."
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
What I would like is a dynamic URL rewriter. When my browser notices a redirect, it submits the URL to a central database and asks for the rewrite rule for the rewriter behind that URL. (i.e. find the url=... in the google redirect).
So my browser would build up a locally cached redirect database, of redirecting rules of sites that I use.
The problem is that this will cause an arms race, that is easy to win for the redirectors. If they have "link=1928347234" instead of "url=http://www.slashdot.org/story/10/09/23/1851220/" it becomes difficult to find the destination URL without building a huge database, as big as the search-engine itself.
Redirect Hell is a real place where your browser WILL be sent at the first sign of defiance.
For some of us less-literate folks, the problem seems even worse. When I try to find something on the web, the first thing I do is enter my quest in the search bar. Soon, a list of 28,132,667,534 hits comes up (in only .00036 microseconds, yet). When I try any of those links, thinking ya, I'm getting somewhere! instead of getting to the place I want, a zillion other websites are there listing all the responses to my original quest. It's like, if I want to buy a pound of apples, I google apples, and then click on one of the resultant links, thinking I will be taken to an apple-provider. No. It's just another site telling me they have a 'better' list of apple-providers! and i never quite get to the store to buy them apples.... (maybe i shudda used as example 'oranges'???) Want another dumb comparison? go to the grocery store, look at the signs hanging from the ceiling for 'soups and veggies'. You get to that isle, and no soups and veggies... instead, shelves lined with ads and instructions on how to get to the 'soups and veggies' isle.
Sourceforge has "Direct Link" on the download page for use in case your download does not automatically start.
It used actually to be a direct link to the desired file. A few months ago it became a link to sourceforge to allow
then to track and then redirect you. You could still copy the link and use it somewhere else but then you only
went to sourceforge for the redirection and not to their download page to have your doubleclick cookies updated.
Well ... can't have that. Now the direct link (as they call it) does not work unless you immediately click it while
on the sourcforge page for it now includes a timestamp.
It is stlll called the "direct link".