[ShadowAce]

[newheart]

So what’s the dif b/n that and this when you follow an outside link from Free Republic:

“You have selected a link to an external website. In a few moments you will be redirected to http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/09/22/is-the-web-heading-toward-redirect-hell/";

I have always figured there was some technical reason why that step is needed.

[Still Thinking]

Every time you click on a search result in Google or Bing there’s an intermediate step via Google’s servers (or Bing’s) before you’re redirected to the real target site.

So use Scroogle (Google's results without their busybodying) or Ixquick, or just hover to get the link and paste it in the url bar of a new tab. FORCE them to mind their own business. Starve the beast.

[Mr. Bird]

I’m not sure about redirect hell, but it does seem like FreeRepublic is turning into blog hell. I mean this not as a criticism of you specifically, but it seems the forum is now dominated by personal bloggers posting “articles” from their own blog. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, I suppose, but they used to be vanities, and could be evaluated as such.

[Larry Lucido]

What I’m curious about is, what does the author want? Is this one of those “there ought to be a law” things? Because you need to be careful what you wish for.

[PA Engineer]

I knew this was going to happen when the web turned away from Mosaic.

[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.