Safari doesn't show titles for click throughs on google search results…

Sometime recently -- maybe in the last month or so -- a glitch came up with Google and Safari 6. I don't know if it happened when I upgraded to Safari 6 or if it's the result of encrypted search results on Google.

example search results

As you can see here, when I search for something on Google, the history show that search. But when I click on a result, the history shows a crazy Google URL and does not show the title of the site that I went to, which makes it impossible to go back to something I was looking at earlier without randomly trying a bunch of different search results.

Any idea why this is happening, and how I can disable it? This is relatively new behavior. Between this and the new web inspector, I can't stand Safari anymore.


You can use the Detox extension for Safari and Chrome, which fixes this on Google and Twitter.

This happens because Google switched to a client-side redirect for their tracking links (in JavaScript, I think) so the browser thinks the tracking page is the page you wanted. I'm not sure why. Twitter does the same thing, but it's so that they can grab the referer when you click on a t.co link from a client or another website.