Google Experimenting

It's been a busy week as I'm in Colorado at the Human Factors and Ergonomics conference.  Somewhere during the week, I was apparently part of a random sample of Google experimentation.  The change was that links included redirects -- presumably for personalization, given the recent Kaltix acquisition.

A quick history scan didn't reveal the url and the experiment seems over.  Probably a 405 redirect, so there's not likely to be a history entry.

Suprisingly, they did make one major gaffe in the execution. Redirects look like foo.cgi?foo=bar&url=www.cnn.com, but google put extra parameters both before and after the URL.  Big no no, as it makes it much harder to copy the url.

I use anonymous click tracking in the surf*mind*web collection to rank search results. I also surface a top ten recently popular items on the portal homepage. Whoops, I made this gaffe too -- fix incoming. |||
Posted at NaN:NaN