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Is the Web Heading Toward Redirect Hell?

Posted by timothy on from the here-let-me-bounce-you-a-few-times dept.

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."

17 of 321 comments (clear)

  1. How do you get offenders to stop? by alain94040 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

    1. Re:How do you get offenders to stop? by TooMuchToDo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Any ideas on how to convince people to stop?

      Create a web service where you can provide a shortened URL and it will respond back with the full URL. Make sure this web service caches the redirect for at least 24 hours. You instantly kill any reason for the redirect to be there (their counts will no longer be accurate).

      If someone wants to use this sort of service, I'd be happy to throw it together and provide it for free.

    2. Re:How do you get offenders to stop? by sarx · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I agree; but to be fair, I think it is easy for people with a little less knowledge to heuristically lump bandwidth and latency together, especially if they aren't dealing with (say) satellite links, because links with very low latency are in practice somewhat more likely to have high bandwidth. So if it is wrong, it is at least understandably wrong.

    3. Re:How do you get offenders to stop? by dyingtolive · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Nice. If that got turned into a firefox plugin to realtime decrypt the links...

      --
      Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
    4. Re:How do you get offenders to stop? by skids · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Not to mention, when a shared medium or statistically multiplexed PtP link of low bandwidth has congestion, latency is higher than on a higher bandwidth link, which has a much shallower queue built up and/or takes less time to wait for the 1500 byte packet that just started being transmitted to get out of the way. The distinction is only really relevant when you're discussing technicals of TCP window scaling and bandwidth delay product. Certainly not to the end user: "slow" is "slow".

      --
      Someone had to do it.
    5. Re:How do you get offenders to stop? by eth1 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yeah. Load the page as normal, then, in the background, replace the redirects with direct links.

      As a bonus, if enough people started using it, it would so bork up the tracking stats (and the load on the redirect servers) that using redirects like that would be less appealing in the first place.

    6. Re:How do you get offenders to stop? by martin-boundary · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Any ideas on how to convince people to stop?

      This would require a browser plugin to create a dictionary, by converting the short URLs into their long forms, and share that dictionary with others. Ideally, only one person would actually click through the shortened URL to learn what the long URL is, while everyone else would take advantage of that knowledge.

      Basically, this amounts to creating a community driven middle man for the URL shortening middle men. The required technology isn't more sophisticated than spam blocklists, which have been done before.

      If 80% of the most popular shortened links are community cached, then 80% of the most valuable browsing statistics will be unavailable to the shortened URL provider, and they'll have trouble monetizing their "added value".

    7. Re:How do you get offenders to stop? by Surt · · Score: 2, Interesting

      If he thought it was actually a physical series of tubes, he was largely correct, as that's in fact what it is. Lots of plastic tubes filled with glass or copper.

      --
      "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
  2. www.linuxtoday.com is the champion by bogaboga · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  3. Why it has to be so technically impractical? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...

  4. Re:Techie price greater than luser price by Spazntwich · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've noticed this as well, and just consider it the price I have to pay to avoid losing my nerd credentials along with my tiny bank balance.

    But it is becoming more prevalent, and I'm not sure what the solution is. Part of me worries this is one of the setup steps in someone's grand scheme to make the internet "dangerous" enough that the "only solution" is to grant absolute internet authority to agency x. You know. To protect the children from all the sexual predators hiding kiddie porn in bit.ly links.

  5. Re:Techie price greater than luser price by interkin3tic · · Score: 2, Interesting

    My university seems to have come up with a plan to advertise themselves to staff and students who already work/study here: provide no direct link to the university e-mail. They want you to go to the front page, to see the latest news you're not interested in and ways to make donations to the university (hint hint), then login, and you'll be taken to more irrelevant news, links for course tools, and another link for e-mail, which will redirect you one or two times before getting to a google mail system.

    I have it automatically forward everything to a normal gmail account that is easier to access anyway, so it doesn't matter except for those few times when I need to access it directly. I usually make a mental note to spend 5 minutes finding out a more direct way and memorizing it, but then never get around to it.

  6. Re:My Idea by NevarMore · · Score: 2, Interesting

    http://breakingcode.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/having-fun-with-url-shorteners/

  7. Re:My Idea by clone53421 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Done.

    http://tinyurl.com/25lsp67
    http://3.ly/2e5g64f

    bit.ly adds its own little blab page if it detects multiple redirects, which is entertaining in its own way I guess... never-ending loop:

    http://bit.ly/9bV4Re

    The preview feature is fun too...

    http://3.ly/RwuW
    http://tinyurl.com/k2w9uiz

    --
    Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
  8. wasn't there a time.... by bickerdyke · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  9. Re:My Idea by clone53421 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Infinite recursion that defeats browser infinite recursion detection:

    http://3.ly/3x5qdno
    http://tinyurl.com/36n5j5y

    (the tinyurl long link is <html><body><script>var t=setTimeout('window.location="http://3.ly/3x5qdno";',50);</script></body></html> encoded in a data: URI)

    --
    Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
  10. Re:It's called onmousedown! by spage · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Hmm, it varies. In Firefox if I'm logged in to Google a search result has an href with a plain URL but the onmousedown rewrites as I described above. If I log out the href is a Google URL and there's still an onmousedown rewrite. But in Konqueror where Google knows nothing about me, I get a plain href and no onmousedown handler.

    So maybe another way to avoid Google tracking is use an obscure browser?

    --
    =S