how does google know what people click?
 

how does google know what search results people click??????????????????

Ugh ? Are you a surfer or what ? You can log what people do on your website...

they signed up for www.gotadtracker.com

For a while they were going through a tracking URL. Looks like they're back to direct/hard links.

true but its not entirely obvious how they do the tracking . Like yahoo and google both used to run their links through their server first ( to check whats being clicked ) , that doesnt happen now its direct links on google..

like before it was http://www.google.com?outboundlink=h...uclicked. com

I wonder if they could do something like

<img name="some" src="http://www.google.com/1x1.gif" width=1 height=1>
<a href="http://www.hardlink.com/" onclick="img.some='http://www.google.com/track?url=...'">

(I've probably got the javascript a bit wrong, but you get the idea)

That way it's still a hard link, but they're tracking most clicks.