Thanks for the reply -- not quite, comments interspersed below: On Monday, June 07, 2021 04:38:24 PM Greg Wooledge wrote: > On Mon, Jun 07, 2021 at 04:28:03PM -0400, rhkra...@gmail.com wrote: > > time) when I go to do a google search, the little message down in the > > lower left corner of the screen that typically gives messages like > > (paraphrased): ~"waiting for google.com" or "loading data from > > google.com" (with variations on the URL) sometimes starts with a > > completely irrelevant URL (but one that I recognize and that concerns > > me). > > Let's make sure we understand each other completely here. I believe > what you are doing is: > > 1) Open firefox. It has a default or nearly-default configuration. > > 2) Go to www.google.com. > > 3) Search for something. Doesn't matter what.
What I see is happening while the google search result page is "populating" (or actually waiting for it to start populating), the first thing I see (sometimes) is something like ~"waiting for buckslib.org" You don't have to go any further (i.e., to your step 4, the problem I see occurs before that). Aside: I am familiar with the behavior you describe below, the redirecting through www.google.com first. (For now, I haven't deleted the following.) > 4) Hover the mouse on one of the search results. A URL will be shown in > the lower left corner. > > 5) Actually click the search result. Instead of going to the page that > you saw in the corner prior to clicking, you are redirected through > www.google.com first. > > If this is what you mean, then yes, this is how Google works. It's not > specific to Firefox. > > If you replace step 4 with "Right-click on the URL and select Copy Link > Location, then paste the URL into a terminal", you'll see that the actual > URL is of the form > https://www.google.com/[stuff]&url=https%3A%2F%2F[realURL]. > > This is how Google knows which link you clicked on. > > Ostensibly, they do this so they can "score" their search results and > promote the ones that people click, and demote the ones they don't. > > Whatever else they may use this information for... is not public knowledge, > but we can speculate. > > So, you may be asking, "Hey, if the real URL that I'm going to visit is > www.google.com/something, why is it showing me www.debian.org in the > corner of the page?" Javascript. The answer is Javascript. It allows > page creators to lie to end users in all kinds of ways.
