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AltaLink

v0.8 - Remove yahoo.com redirection from AltaVista links.

AltaLink cleans up all the snooping redirections that are normally part of the AltaVista search engine results.

What usually happens when you click on an AltaVista link is that you are sent (invisibly) to a server under yahoo.com (parent company of AltaVista/Overture) which then redirects you to the page you wanted. If you have a Yahoo ID then this has just told them who you are and exactly what you clicked on. Okay, not a big issue since you've probably tried your search on Yahoo before this. But such snooping is at least underhand, IMHO. In fact the image results actually conceal the yahoo.com redirects by rewriting the status line to make it appear as though you are going straight to the page - I'm not even certain if that's legal considering the information gathering potential.

AltaLink will fix that. It replaces the yahoo.com redirects with links to the actual sites. It also reformats the links leading to AltaVista's function pages (Web, Images, more info, etc) to remove similar inter-domain tattling.

v0.8 - 20th June 2006






Jun 19, 2006
Tarmle Script's author

The overture.com links are the "Sponsored Matches" that appear at the top of the results page. These were left out because I thought it pretty obvious that advertising links would be redirected/monitored if only to gauge how much should be charged for them. But looking at the typical results page again they really don't make this clear enough (notice that these "fake" results are formatted exactly like the rest with only a grey-on-white label marking them out, hoping you'll miss it and click on a sponsor thinking it's "real").

In response to this I've altered Altalink to direct-link these as well. This takes it to v0.8.
 
May 14, 2006
mar 1 Scriptwright

For some reason I don't get this script to work properly because it still redirects through Yahoo! (more exactly under www10.overture.com). I am using Greasemonkey v0.6.4. Obviously, I'm not a scripting expert , so I cannot give you any technical detail on my problem. But, either Altavista has modified their Web site to bypass your script, or your script just happens not to be compatible with the latest version of Greasemonkey. Hope you can fix this redirecting annoyance soon. I'm pleased, though, that someone here is trying to put an end to a great example of privacy invasion.

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