Is the Web heading toward redirect hell?

Pingdom ^ | 22 September 2010 | Pingdom

[Larry Lucido]

Same here.

I mean, I want lots of things too. And I hate redirects too. The biggest problem is that they keep you captive. You can’t just click back to where you were, so you have to close your browser, or search your history to see where you were. But usually when you identify a problem it’s nice to propose a solution or two, also. Makes for a better essay. When folks leave stuff hanging, that’s when my suspicions are aroused. Like those stores about the dangers of fast foods. What is unspoked is that they are laying the groundwork for legal advocacy. Maybe this author isn’t proposing this, but it would be nice if he would say what free-market approaches would work to alleviate the problem he describes.

[listenhillary]

Scroogle I suppose is a free market alternative. The author didn’t mention it though.

Thanks to reading the article and comments, I discovered Scroogle.

[GOPJ]

Going someplace by CHOICE is different than being forced to waste your time being redirected to where you don’t want to go...

[Still Thinking]

Yup. I've been using Ixquick.

You know, it strikes me this would be a good build-in or add-on for Firefox. If you're on a Google search result page, and you click a link, strip out the redirect and load the link page directly.

[Still Thinking]

Hmmm, I don’t know if Firefox is covering for Google or not, but when I hover, I see a direct, explicit URL for the link from the search page. They may be keeping a score, but it doesn’t look like they’re doing an intermediate redirect.

[ken in texas]

The diff is that with the hidden redirection it's easy to think you're going directly to the target website, and it might not be obvious that you're going through an intermediary. If I click on a Google link, I want to go directly to it, not via a redirect from Google. I'm also sure many people blindly click on links here hoping to go to another thread on FR.

John Rob is merely advising you that you're going external. It's the same info you see on many corporate and government sites if you select a link on a site outside of their control. I just click directly on the link in that message and bypass the additional delay. It's one more mouse click... I need the exercise. :-)