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Getting rid of "Google Goo"

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app103:
Anyone with a Google account may have started experiencing something rather unpleasant recently, when doing searches while logged in.

Google has begun adding extra tracking garbage to links, making it rather difficult to copy a link target from the search page.

A friend of mine wrote a javascript function that removes the "Google Goo", leaving you with a page full of nice, clean, copyable links.

It has been tested with FireFox 2 and 3, K-Meleon, and IE 6. It should work in all other versions of IE after IE6, as well. Also should work in Opera (in theory), but has not been tested.

What you need to do is create a new bookmark with the function as the target (copy & paste it in). When you do a Google search, before you click anything, click the bookmark and it will clean the page.


Copy the function from the page linked below (don't create a bookmark with the page as the target, or it will not work)

http://pastebin.com/jpMiu5Vj (courtesy of Krishean/draconislabs.net)

UPDATE: His site is down. I think the xbox he was hosting it on died. So here is the code for it:


--- Code: Javascript ---javascript:{function detect(el){var r=false;if(el.className&&el.onmousedown){var c=el.className.split(' '),m=el.onmousedown,t=false;var s=((m.toSource)?m.toSource():m.toString());for(var i=0;i<c.length;i++)if(c[i]=='l')t=true;r=(t&&(s.indexOf('return rwt(')!=-1||s.indexOf('return clk(')!=-1));}return r;}var a=document.getElementById('search').getElementsByTagName('a');for(var i=0;i<a.length;i++)if(detect(a[i]))a[i].setAttribute('onmousedown','');void(0);};

Dormouse:
Works in Opera too. Tested on 9.5beta

sri:
An alternative for Firefox users is CustomizeGoogle add-on. After installing the add-on, go to its options and check 'Remove click tracking'.

icekin:
I use Opera, 9.5 too and I don't seem to have this problem, despite not installing the .js file attached above. I do however have customizegoogle for opera installed. Maybe that does the trick too?

app103:
Not all Google users will get this tracking garbage in their links, and the ones that do will not have it all the time.

It only happens if you have some sort of google account (like gmail, adsense, blogger, etc) and are logged in. Once you log out the links are clean again.

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