I just did a search on “Joi Ito” and got this as the first link. In fact, all the links on the page had a redirection component in the result links. Normally, Google gives the link to the website directly. Looks like they may now be starting to track clickthroughs. I repeated the search on a few other keywords, and I didn’t find it again, so I guess it is one of those Google experiments.
Have you also noticed this? What could be Google’s gameplan behind this? My quick take: to perhaps track relevance of the results, by seeing which link people click on (ie, am I clicking on the first, second, third or none of the links). Or maybe, this is a step forward in personalisation – tracking the searches I do, and then personalising these. Whatever it is, some change seems to be afoot!
