ved

What is inside ved

ved is not random. It is a small Protocol Buffers message, Base64-encoded, and in 2013 the Deed Poll Office published a decoding of it. The fields they identified: a link index that counts up as you go down the page, a link type (an ordinary result, a sitelink, an image, an ad, and so on), the position of the result on the page, and the starting position of the page itself — so page two of the results is distinguishable from page one.

The first character tells you the format. Values starting with 0 are the encoded form; values starting with 1 are the same data as plain text. Later analysis found a longer form starting with 2.

Where you meet it

Google attaches a ved value to links on the results page so that a click can be logged against the exact element that was clicked. It then travels: into the redirect address Google sometimes routes a click through, and into the results URL itself when you refine a search or move between result tabs.

Google publishes no specification for ved. Everything here is observed behaviour or the work of people who decoded it, not a documented contract. The Google search URL overview covers the rest of the session keys.

What it leaks when you share a search

On its own, ved says what you clicked to get where you are — which is information about your browsing, not about the page. Forwarded inside a results URL it travels with ei, which carries the time of the search, and sca_esv.

How LinkClean removes it

Default-on, and scoped to Google's search domains (google.com and the main country domains). The same letters on any other site are left alone, and q=, tbm=, udm= and hl= — the parts that decide what the search shows — are never touched.