Sheetrock's Journal: WTF?

I just noticed something on Google that bothers me. When I do a search, and it comes up with results, the links that I normally click on to visit the websites that were returned from my search now appear to be redirected through Google instead of being direct links to the search results.

In a nutshell, now Google can potentially see not only which topics I search for (unavoidable and expected situation) but which websites I visit from their results pages (unexpected and unnecessary to provide search functionality). I suppose this could be put to good purposes or nefarious purposes, but I would be happier if they didn't implement features that could be a step towards data mining my surfing habits.

No doubt, impotent outrage is brewing in the Internet geek community as I write. Unless this has been going on for weeks and I just haven't noticed.

EDIT: I should note that their privacy policy (under Links) does mention this, as well as an example of how they would put the gathered information to use.

EDIT, 2 hours later: And now it's back to the way it was before -- live test of future functionality? Somebody bump a switch? When it was on, it would call "http://www.google.com/url" with a parameter indicating the actual URL to visit and another indicating the rank of the search result. I understand what they're saying about this being a useful source of data for evaluating and tweaking their search engine, but couldn't it be made opt-in somehow (perhaps by making it an optional feature of their browser plugin?)

Re:it has been that way for months

[Sheetrock]

In this division of the experimental Jupiter orbital space station we are only permitted access to a select few websites (such as Slashdot, Google, and Wikipedia) through a stripped-down WebTV link. Nobody tells us what became of *BSD team, but our moods have certainly improved with the addition of cheese puffs and generic cola to our rations.

The French gentleman above isn't me, but he might make for interesting conversation nonetheless. Somebody needs to start a #trolltalk on IIP (although I haven't ch

Only a matter of time

[BandwidthHog]

I was wondering when they'd start doing that.

news.google.com

[FroMan]

news.google.com has been doing that for quite a while...