Google Redirect Notice

Alright, so this is now starting to bug me, and I really want to get to the bottom of this: Every time I click on the "View image" or "Visit page" links in an image search, I get this stupid Google Redirect notice. This only happens on my regular account on this machine, not on another account. Here are some more details:

- Don't bother, there's no virus. The Redirect Notice itself is on a legitimate Google page, and the links from there (both forward and backward) are legitimate also.
- This only happens for Image searches, regular web searches, videos, etc., all immediately take me to the site in their links.
- I tried it with IE running no add-ons at all, result is the same
- Deleted all my cookies and temporary internet files, and double-checked that cookies were all gone, and still get sent to the redirect page.

I'm out of ideas now. Google searches for this issue mostly lead to crap, half of them babbling about virus infections and trying to get people to install various pieces of crapware. Some people seem to have had success by removing certain add-ons, or all cookies, but none of this seems to help here. Is there anything else I could do?

Oh, the problem also does not exist if a use a different browser.

One more piece of info: It turns out that if the image or page containing the image is at an "https://..." address, then Google directly sends me to the corresponding image or page. Hmm, looks like some kind of a security feature. But where does this come from?

 

home or buisiness using a work network?

i get this sometimes at work.

 

Happens both in my home and my office. None of my other computers do this, neither in my home or my office.

 

A thought, are you manually using the Google DNS server?

 

ive never had it at home before but its different setups.

work, secure hospital network, xp, internet explorer
home, BT internet, windows 7 pro, firefox.

 

No. Usually I try to avoid anything Google like the plague, unless there's no good alternative...

 

I asked as some people manually set them to avoid their ISP's default DNS servers. If on a different ISP than the other systems it is possible the ISP itself is defaulting you too Google's DNS as well. Your router should reveal this, just tracert it from the command line. Mine took 8 hops average 12ms (something I had not looked at before).

 

I think I'm giving up on this. I tried pretty much everything, including completely wiping my IE configuration by resetting it, and deleting everything (cookies, history, cache, forms data, the works), meaning that IE starts up as if it was the first time. I still get the redirect notice.

I suppose there could still be some interaction with something I have installed and running for my standard user (mind you, this does not happen for the admin account on this very same computer), but the possibilities are endless, and my patience isn't.

After having seen a couple of other serious issues with Google.com (up to getting close to crashing IE when using the Back button to return to the Google start page, an issue I see on other machines as well when the Acrobat plugins are active), I just conclude that, as with pretty much all things Google, their Search site is crap as well. By the way, that initial Search page may look deceptively simple, but it is anything but simple. There's some serious wizardry going on behind that seemingly simple façade...

 

why not try firefox?
i personally hate IE but have no choice but use it at work. its never been loaded on any of my home computers.

 

I've been getting redirects now for the last month both on Android and iOS devices. I've seen redirects to the Google and Apple app stores as well as a survey page take over my entire screen. If you can't contact the webmaster just turn off Javascript. That'll stop the redirects.

 

No, as I said, these are not malicious redirects. I am talking about a Redirect notice, which is Google warning me that it is going to send me to a site outside of Google.com. It's something Google does on their side. The rationale behind it is that, when you click on a link on a Google search results page, what you see are actually tracking links, that start with a google.com address. Google realizes that such links could be used for malicious purposes (to thwart blocks of a malicious website), and they will therefore flag such links with a redirect notice page.

Now, since they don't want to bother people who have clicked on one of the links in their search results with such notices every time, what goes on behind the scenes is that when you do a search, Google sets a cookie that allows them to recognize the "legitimate" tracking links. As a consequence, if you click on a link in Google search results, their site will check for this cookie, and if it's there they will not send you to the redirect notice. You can try this by disabling cookies in your browser entirely. If you do that, you will see the Redirect Notice I am talking about every time you click on a link in a Google search results page.

My issue is that, for some reason, this mechanism seems to be broken for me, but only for image searches. In addition, if I right-click on an image in an image search results page, and open the link in a separate tab or window (so that I will see that grey box containing the image and the "View image" and "Visit page" buttons by itself in its own browser window), then clicking on the "View image" or "Visit page" buttons immediately takes me to the image or website, with no redirect notice shown. So, something doesn't work right here, but I have no idea what is causing this.

 

Ah, misunderstood. Thought you were getting a redirect from EVERY url clicked then seeing the url in the address bar and then just moved, not an actual notice dialog box. are you getting this only coming from a Google search page, or from everywhere?

 

This is a Google Redirect Notice, that is generated by the Google website. This does not happen anywhere else, of course. See my original posts, and detailed description above.

 

Ok if Google search alone is doing this I wonder if the URL is developing properly first off. Try this generated from my IE browser;

https://www.google.com/search?q=slo.../www.hoslotcarracing.com/Layouts.html;480;400

 

Thanks, yes, this link behaves the same as my own, I am sent to the Redirect Notice page.

There's two more observations I have:

• I tried stepping through the code using the debugger (F12), and while doing that I set it to emulate IE9 at first. When I tried that the first time, I could navigate to the image directly, without being sent to the Redirect Notice. However, now all of a sudden that doesn't work anymore, either. Quite frequently the debugger just crashes, and if not then I'm back at the Redirect Notice.
• Somewhat more interestingly, if I run my user with administrative privileges, and then also start IE as an Administrator, the problem is reliably gone. This means there must be some permissions issue, somewhere.

 

I was thinking that as well, why I wanted to eliminated the URL. I am on admin usually so I could not emulate the issue natively, let me try the settings of a user account be back in a bit.

 

Thanks. I ran ProcessMonitor in parallel, with instances of IE both with and without admin privileges, but there's a lot going on, obviously, and finding the "right" filtering is hard if you don't know what you're looking for. The two things I can say from this exercise are:

• It doesn't seem there's any suspicious third-party processes. I had done various virus scans for good measure too, and the machine came up as squeaky clean, as expected.
• I do see some privilege-related messages that indicate the jump lists system (certain file operations on Recent\CustomDestinations fail), but there's always a lot of that stuff (Access Denied messages) on any Windows system, so that doesn't really mean that much. I do see, however, that CustomDestinations files get updated when I run with admin rights, and they're not updated otherwise. If that has anything at all to do with the issue I'm seeing is entirely unclear, though.

 

is this what you get? I turned security in internet all the way up and go this.

 

No, it looks like this:

Untitled by Pirx posted Jan 30, 2015 at 12:33 PM

 

As an aside, I have seen reports from people who get that problem intermittently, for a while, and then it suddenly goes away. In addition, it seems to affect all browsers: Some people only see it in IE and FF, others only in Chrome and Opera, etc., etc. It's possible that this is just Google running one of its experiments as they do all the time...

 

When you run IE as admin does it then still have you logged in with your google profile? Running as sys admin may then not use the same cookie set etc.

 

No, here's what I need to do: I have to

• Give my standard user administrative rights (in Control Panel, User Accounts and Family Safety). If I then log in as that user, any programs I start will still run with restricted privileges by default, and there is no change in behavior.
• So what I need to do is right-click on the IE shortcut, and choose "Run as administrator". After confirming the UAC prompt I then have IE running with elevated privileges while still using all of the settings in my normal user profile. Same cookie set, same history, same plugins, same settings, everything is identical. The only difference is that the process is now running with administrative privileges. If I do this, I will not get a Redirect Notice.

 

My suggestion for now, is go to tools and under security etc. get everything set to default, safe sites privacy and the like. Also though if you click that information tab does it yield any help?

Also when I run both standard and as admin I get two different pages and cookie sets etc..

 

None of that has any effect whatsoever. As I had said above, I did a test where I completely blew away all of my IE settings, cookies, history, everything. As a result, IE started up as if it was the first time it's ever run. The result is the same.

Now, of course, keep in mind that Google doesn't have to rely on stuff like cookies. I'm pretty certain that they use cookieless tracking extensively by now, so it's very well possible that I'm just part of an experiment here. Like all of us...

P.S.: That information tab belongs to this forum, it's unrelated to this issue.

No, you won't, if you follow the steps I outlined. There is only one user profile.

 

See Edit 2;

Edit; also if you strictly log in as system admin does the issue continue? If not have you tried creating another user to try it out as well?

Edit 2; OK I did what you were saying and now see what you are talking about, I never do this for any other user on my systems is why I was confused, all other users are standard only. My above question still is what I am wondering. If the regular admin account works properly then will a new user standard account you create now work?

 

That's what I do, as described in great deal in my post above.

See above, it's the same user, otherwise this test would tell me nothing.

I'm not sure what you are asking. If you're asking about logging in as the built-in administrator, which is only given an administrative token and thus always has full rights, then, no, this issues does not appear. In other words, it is strictly a permissions issue. Otherwise, see above.

From what I wrote above it is clear that any new user that is running IE with a restricted rights token will see the same issue.

 

When I first setup the system I was asked to give an admin user name, then I setup standard users. Do you have a separate admin login?

Edit; even if not sometimes creating a new user can eliminate issues. I had one system a while back and it was the only way to set it right, eventually moved all files to the new account giving it privileges etc.. And while yes a long shot, it is free (other than time) to try.

 

I take back what I wrote above: You were correct: I did create a new user, and this one does not have the issue, even without admin rights. Alright, so that's one more clue. However, switching over to a new user is completely out of the question here. We'd be talking weeks of work. That stupid image search on Google isn't worth even a small fraction of the effort that this would cost me.

 

I can understand that. Just trying to help out. Sometimes punting is not an option.

 

Oh don't get me wrong, I do appreciate your efforts, and you pushing me to try a new user did give me more insight. However, at the end of the day this is a minor annoyance, and my time these days is measured, and very expensive...

Thanks again!

So, to bring this story to a conclusion, here's what I ended up doing: Since I've had it with these (and a few other) IE issues, I took another close look at the newest version of Chrome and FF. I have had Chrome on this machine for a long time, but I haven't used it much, and I had not looked at FF in a few years. Long story short, since Chrome has more extensions that are useful to me, I decided to switch my browser over to Chrome. I had managed to make FF look quite nice as well (after a bit of research into a set of plugins to make it usable, including Classic Theme Restorer, and the Metal Lion Address Bar Improvements), but it is missing a few add-in features that are really helpful in Chrome. Finally, once I found a Chrome extension that brings back a real Windows 7 scrollbar, so I won't have to see that Metro crap on my beautiful Win7 desktop, I was sold.

 

Other options can be a bit involved and some not for the timid. IE.;

1.) reinstall the update that will revert to IE9, then back again.
2.) From the new user export some of the registry.
3.) As stated move to the new user.
4.) Run a registry comparison for the current user.

As an example and some with varying success, difficulty and hazard. Glad though you found a usable solution.

 

Heh, I actually tried 1), and just in case anybody wants to go there, DON'T. You could be in a world of hurt. In my case, after I had done that I could not go back to IE 10 or 11. In fact, I did manage to go back to IE8 (remember that one?), with no way to go back up. Windows update, offline update, etc., etc., all failed with various error messages. At that point my only option was to restore an image I had from a few weeks ago.

Numbers 2) and 3) I thought about, but those are not at all easy, and there's no guarantee they would help. IE stores information all over the place, not just in the registry. Thus, we're also looking at replacing information in APPDATA/local and APPDATA/Roaming, and it's not a given that I could just copy all of that stuff over. In fact, it is clear that the user-specific registry cannot be just copied, since it contains user-dependent information. I'm not saying that this cannot be done, but it's a very serious project. Like I said, I don't have the time for this crap.

As for 4), well, feel free to take a look at that registry tree. It's huge. Run a comparison? Sure, and then what?

No, unfortunately, as far as I can tell this situation is hopeless. By the way, the restored system still has the same issue, meaning this has started quite a while ago. I am almost certain it's a combination of something with my configuration together with a change that Google has made.

 

For 4 , as said varying success, there may or may not be an answer. The system I did was for someone else, no way to do anything but get the user converted and it took only a few hours as it was just a casual home system. I was not about to invest days, or even weeks, getting it fixed.

I have two machines I tried that update removal multiple times that lost Aero. Each time getting back to IE 10 or IE11 was no issue other than still no Aero. Probability is it would not fix it but again something to try.

 

Hmm, this is interesting: Things seem to be deteriorating more and more with my Internet Explorer on this machine and Google web pages: As of now (after installing the Windows Updates, but I'm not sure if that caused it) I cannot see any Google Maps maps anymore. If I go to maps.google.com, IE will show a map of my location briefly, but then the entire map goes blank except for the grid lines. I wonder if that tells anybody anything about what it is that may be going wrong here.

P.S.: If I hit the refresh button while on one of these blank maps, the map displays for about a second, and then it blanks over again.

P.P.S.: More detail: What happens is I see the Search bar alone on top of the map. Next, a white box comes up right beneath the Search bar, which has the directions button and such on it. When that box comes up, the map blanks out.

 

Ahrrgghhh... Problem solved. The "issue" and the source of all the problems I had seen with anything Google was that I had set google.com as a Trusted Site in IE's security settings. Unfortunately it turns out that when you do that, Google's code breaks, and nothing works the way it should.
Anyway, hope this may help some poor soul some day when they stumble across this thread while googling the reason why their google searches don't work anymore...

 

Obligatory XKCD:

Thanks for posting the solution to avoid those kind of situations.

 

This was 2007 and images-redirect.

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/02/google-redirect-notice.html

The present situation must be along the same line. Security Issue.

Cheers
3Fees

wow triple post, wheres delete the extras messages.

Adding: Where a site uses google to redirect to there web page, image,ect, a redirect notice can appear made by google, so google requests a click to visit it.




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A W E S O M E ! ! !
Thank you so much, i was left helpless ... then i found your great solution!
It's a shame that the Microsoft Info to completely reset IE Settings https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/923737 DO NOT reset security zones too ...
BTW THANK YOU VERY MUCH!