Quite a stir was caused by
my post about Google doing click-tracking. Many people wrote on various sites that this was simply part of Google's "personalized search" or "search history" feature. This is not true and it has been tested to be not true. While it may have started there, click-tracking is done on users who have no connection to Google other than having entered "google.com" in their browser.
While privacy issues are still under debate, the issue that still really bugs me the most is that they broke the right-click copy-and-paste functionality of their search results. Anyone who uses Google is going to have to get used to the fact that they must amass a scary amount of information about their users. However, it just doesn't seem like Google to all of a suddent start providing
less functionality to their users. It seems so backwards for them.
So what was the result of all the fuss? There's now
a Greasmonkey script to remove the click-tracking. And the Firefox extension
Customize Google now has a new feature to remove Google click-tracking.
I am personally using the Customize Google extension for Firefox. It works beautifully and I could not be happier. It has many other features that I like, such as adding Google Suggest to the regular search box on Google, removing ads, adding links to result sets on other search engines, auto-switches you to HTTPS when using Gmail, and much more.