Google making its infrastructure more opaque and extractive

Google has replaced direct URLs in search results with opaque redirect URLs in the form of google.com/goto?url=<base64 string>. The thread is not subtle about what this means: Google now controls every outbound click, can track exactly where you go, and has made it much harder for scrapers, researchers, and alternative clients to extract clean data from search results.

Commenters immediately flagged the ClearURLs Firefox extension as a workaround, and several said this would push them off Google entirely. But the more interesting reaction was the framing: Google isn't doing this to improve user experience. It's doing it to tighten control over its distribution layer, both for tracking and for anti-scraping purposes. Given that Google's ad business depends on attribution, this is also an attribution play.

This sits next to Anthropic cutting off third-party harnesses from Claude subscriptions, and Cloudflare blocking non-mainstream browsers. The pattern is large platforms tightening the perimeter around their infrastructure, often framed as security or quality, while the actual effect is locking out power users and alternative clients.