Google macht das mindestens seit Ende letzten Jahres, mal mehr oder weniger offensichtlich im Code. Es gibt da ein nettes Javascript das ein Tracking-Bild lädt bevor die eigentliche Seite aufgerufen wird, vorgeschaltete Tracking-URLs und noch nen paar solche Spielchen... nix neues also :)

Google have been doing this for at least a year or so. In fact, doing a bit of Googling, I found you even posted about it on your blog back in June 2004:

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2004_06_14_index.html

(And I think I've commented on it on this forum before now too.)

So, it can't be related to Search History or Personalized Search as they weren't around then.

They seem to have a few method for doing the same thing. They occassionally use a redirect on Google UK rather than an onClick-image-load-type-script.

I have been wondering whether this affects ranking at all. Does anyone know? Has anyone ever tried using a dodgy script that calls URLs using those redirects?

Presumably the random string is used to somehow verify the validity of the redirect though... but it wouldn't be too difficult to screenscrape for an up-to-date random string... not that I'm suggesting anyone should do that! ;-)

If you use page info in Firefox and clic kon the links tab you'll see only some have redirects. Then if you do a mousedown on a link and go to page info you'll it has changed to a redirect.

The latest version of the CustomizeGoogle extension for Firefox automatically deletes all redirects. http://www.customizegoogle.com