I've never seen this before... The google results from a google.com search for 'hilary duff' (without the quotes) returns links through a redirect instead of direct links, like so: http: //www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=3&q=http://www.hilary-duff.net/&e=42 Has anyone ever seen this before? I just checked a bunch of other keywords and they all were direct links. The 'e=42' is consistent for all results. Also, doesn't this prevent the linked site from capturing the keywords from the referrer field?
I have heard people saying in the past that google does it sometimes in order to record the CTR for a certain site and also the amount of time that user spent on that site. Does not know however if its true
The referral should still be captured. I'v seen this before a while back, i always thought its google checking/recording results/stats. Why are you looking at hilary duff stuff? lol
I ran into it on google.ca recently: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=23695 That post got moved from the google forum. Shut off your cookies and check it again. Do you get regular urls?
It had been discussed before: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=17460 but exactly what the e=#### does I have been trying to figure out. Is it a geographic tracker, or specific to a user? Is that the actual number you saw? http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers.asp shows that these urls are 302's, but my logs show they do not kill the actual referrer and keywords. They look like: [nourl]http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=keywords&meta= [/nourl] But the link that actually gets followed by a visitor will give Google the referrer as the url of the result clicked upon, in your example: start=3&q=http://www.hilary-duff.net and the redirect seems to send the proper referrer. Start = ranking, and the url is the page to be loaded. This means that Google has: Keywords Url Current Rank all combined in one place, the /url? script. The information could be used to track which page is most popular for that keyword. Having the current position means that Google probably is doing just that. If e=specific user, it would filter out excessive clicks from one user inflating the clickthru. So, what is your e= number, anyone?
My guess was that the 'e' value identified the keyword search that was done (since it appears this is only done on a very small set of keyword searches). I tried many searches similar to the original one I did, but no other results used the redirects.
It's not a keyword indicator; I am still producing the results on google.ca with cookies on, and on several unrelated searches the urls all show the same e number. In my case, I am seeing 10342, and was wondering if you edited the e number before posting. I was assuming up until I saw you post e=42 that it was a user id, but if that is the number, or it ended in 42, it may be a geo tracker if we are both in say, North America. The older post I linked to above, the user had e=9707, it was on google.nl, and I am fairly certain he was not in the U.S.
Yes, 42 was the number I saw. I turned off cookies from Google and went through proxy servers in Europe and still got 42.
If that's the case, they were probably serving the dynamic urls temporarily to everyone who accessed that server, datacenter, or results set. My guess is that the last 2 numbers indicate where the serps came from, and maybe the cookied first 3 numbers I have are indicative of the locale of the user. This would come in handy in adjusting semantics for geographic regions: If one was American and searched for 'twigs & berries' the assumption that the person is looking for floral decorations would probably be more correct than the assumption made if the person were Brittish. If more Brits used google.ca than Americans, it would make sense to adjust it toward the Brittish interpretation. It could also be used to adjust for a change of meaning for a word or phrase over time among the searching population. Either way, they are probably more interested in men...
No, Google's a woman! I just searched on sarahk (although hilary duff is a fine choice) http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&ct...ropertymanager.com/&ei=fCb5QrT2G8Tu4AG2hOGRDg where is the e= ? <p class=g><a href="http://sarahk.pcpropertymanager.com/blog/" onmousedown="return clk(this.href,'res','3','')">A Kiwi Geek writes…</a><br> <font size=-1>August 5, 2005. There are no responses · NZ Votes. Filed under: New Zealand at<br> 12:49 pm. Yep, sure enough, NZ will be voting on Sept. <b>...</b><br> <font color=#008000><b>sarahk</b>.pcpropertymanager.com/blog/ - 36k - </font> <nobr> <a class=fl href="http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:QQLjIlAY-yoJ:sarahk.pcpropertymanager.com/blog/+sarahk&hl=en">Cached</a> - <a class=fl href="/search?hl=en&lr=&q=related:sarahk.pcpropertymanager.com/blog/">Similar pages</a></nobr></font> <blockquote class=g><p class=g><a href="http://sarahk.pcpropertymanager.com/" onmousedown="return clk(this.href,'res','4','')">Sarah King :: Web Data on Demand</a><br><font size=-1>Web Data on Demand, let Sarah King design and write your next data driven website.<br><font color=#008000><b>sarahk</b>.pcpropertymanager.com/ - 10k - </font><nobr> <a class=fl href="http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:b_-nyzJL8EEJ:sarahk.pcpropertymanager.com/+sarahk&hl=en">Cached</a> - <a class=fl href="/search?hl=en&lr=&q=related:sarahk.pcpropertymanager.com/">Similar pages</a></nobr></font> </blockquote> Code (markup):