Hello hm -- us, I keep encountering partly the same and additional problems and am getting more and more annoyed with Google. Have you seen the thread three months ago?
  related discussion:Google liefert zunehmend Schrott

@hm -- us:

I do not get some of your points:
"And I have noticed that they've gone back to secretly substituting a fake URL headed by their own domain for every link that you click on, which I find extremely underhanded."

If I look at the page source all links are directly linked to the originating websites. Only the [cached] and [similar pages] results are preheaded with another domain, which makes of course completely sense.

"I have also noticed, I think, that they secretly repeat links you have already read if their software judges that your eyes paused on it in scrolling down the page. I find this worse than underhanded, indeed, really insidious."

This seems a bit paranoid to me. Despite from never having noticed that, I doubt that this is technically feasible. Once the page is delivered to your browser, there is NO return communication until you click something. Thus Google cannot know when you stop scrolling.

I use Google several times every day, but have not noticed any significant changes. I haven't checked for additional cookies, but then these days many sites deposit not one but multiple cookies on my machine. I will admit that I simply rely on Ad-Aware and Spybot Search&Destroy to weed about the "bad apples" among these. I am intrigued by the comment about the "fake URLs". We are not talking about links to Google's cached pages, but to the actual websites indexed, right? If so, I see no evidence of this. As for "academic-type pages": Are you aware of scholar.google.com? I have used it ever since CiteSeer started operating in some non-obvious, non-intuitive fashion.

To see what various pieces of software running on your machine are up to, you could try the free tools from www.sysinternals.com, especially Process Explorer.

@holger: Yes, I do indeed remember that, now that you mention it, thank you. I'll have to read it again more carefully, but as I recall, no one else had any really good alternative either.

@Hein: Well, okay, it may be paranoid. I just don't see any other reason for the exact same link to show up a second or third time. It only happens when you go through a couple of pages of links and don't actually click on any of them, just scan to see which ones might be useful.

Thanks BTW for your correction about 'filtrate.' I shouldn't have guessed, there's been way too much water under the bridge since high school chemistry. At least I knew it was a noun. (-;

@Norbert: Okay, maybe I'm misunderstanding something about the URLs, it could well be, I wouldn't be surprised, since I'm really a fuzzy, not a techie. (If those terms aren't already hopelessly out of date.) I just think I've noticed that if you only want to copy a URL, not actually open the link, you can right-click on it, but instead of its own name under Properties you get its name prefaced by google.com plus some code and followed by a little more code for the Google search button. This extra code was not always the case, then it was for several months or a year, then it wasn't for a few months, and now it has been again the last couple of weeks.

But then right this minute, when I checked, it wasn't. Very interesting. I'm absolutely certain I'm not imagining this, in fact, I could swear that earlier this very day I've copied a couple of links and had to edit the Google garbage out. Or at least yesterday or the day before.

I do use scholar.google once in a great while, but it's sort of a nuisance to get to since there's no link directly to it from the main search page. For the few things I've tried it for, it seems to have a much higher percentage of medical and scientific/technical articles than ones in the humanities.

And if you actually try to click through to the full text, often you find that it's only accessible from a university-affiliated computer subscribed to some special service. I wish I was a university or had a password to a university system. I checked that out at my own dear alma mater and of course there's nothing like that available for alumni, not even access to the university library system. So much for all that tuition. And they wonder why I never respond to their constant fund-raising efforts ... <sigh>

Sorry, maybe I'm just in the mood to gripe about things. At least the weather hasn't been that bad lately, a little rain. Or at least thunder.

I cannot reproduce the "right-clock/properties" issue with Google links. It may have been a transient problem.

The state of scientific publishing is a pain in the behind to be sure, especially for practioniers out in industry like me as opposed to members of academia. Like you I have found that electronic repositories such as JSTOR are limited to an exclusive clientele (universities, research institutes, and the like) and provide no mechanisms for individuals to access their collections. I'd be happy to pay them a reasonable amount of money for each paper retrieved if only they would let me.

I have to admit that I am too sometimes surprised by Google results, i.e. more hits on site:de than in a general search of the whole web. And I could reproduce your 700 hits but only one displayed example. But overall I think that it is too difficult for Google to play big brother on my machine. If I have any concern than it is about what they can extrapolate from all the search strategies they encouter.

Speaking from the other site of the academic divide: If it doesn't happen too often I can retrieve an article for you from time to time. Just post an email address and I'll send you mine. Somehow I don't want to deanonymise myself directly below this offer. ;))

@hm-us: I don't think it's the fact that less sites are indexed, but the fact that more sites than ever are indexed which accounts for more and more garbage retrieved in search queries. Google seems to have a really hard time filtering out the valid from the invalid results.

As for the link substitution, if you're using Firefox, use the Greasemonkey extension to get rid of these. Just search for "google" on userscripts.org after installing GM.

Regarding the scholar issue: In FF as well, create a quicksearch for scholar, that will help you safe some time. Just do a search with scholar, then bookmark the results page, substitute the actual search term in the URL with %s and give the whole thing a keyword (e.g., "scholar"). Next time you want to do a search, just type in "scholar searchterm" in the FF address bar. Unfortunately, that won't solve the tech and medical academia bias, but it's a nice thing to have nevertheless ;)

I can't say I've noticed any of the effects you describe.

Do you have the Google toolbar installed and, if so, do you have the option for Page Rank display enabled?

@MrFlan
Danke für den Tipp! Hab gleich mal Suchmaschinen-Quicksearch-Erstellen gespielt :-)