Internal redirect (307) when accessing Google ads

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1

First, a bit of context. I’m using NextDNS and one of the main drawbacks is that the domain googleadservices.com gets blocked, so any links in the Ads section of the Google search page are blocked. Many times, when I’m searching for some product, I want to click on those links.

I could just whitelist the domain, but I fear I could be opening a door for other ads that I don’t want, so my procedure so far is to copy the link, decode it and extract the store URL that is buried in there. This is very cumbersome, and I was thinking about coding some extension just to do that automatically.

But, to my surprise, starting this week I noticed that Brave is opening the right store URL if I click on a Google ad link, bypassing the DNS by an internal redirect (307), which is exactly what I wanted. I tested on Chrome and the links are still blocked, so I believe this is some feature specific to Brave.

Just want to confirm: is this the expected behavior? Any documentation on that? Thanks!

2

Example of the link?

3

Here. This is a link of an Adword for “Brave”.

Note that the final URL (https://try.bravesoftware.com/dgf367/) is buried inside. This won’t open in Chrome because googleadservices.com is blacklisted, but will open in Brave, and DevTools shows an internal redirect.

4

Could be related to Debouncing https://brave.com/privacy-updates/11-debouncing/

Which was recently enabled.

5

Definitely related to debouncing, thanks!

From the article:

Brave uses a Brave maintained list to identify bounce tracking URLs. This list is maintained by Brave, and is drawn from a mix of crowd-sourcing and existing open-source projects…

The list is a JSON that contains the configuration that triggers the behavior I described:

  {
    "include": [
      "*://*.googleadservices.com/*"
    ],
    "exclude": [
    ],
    "action": "redirect",
    "param": "adurl"
  },

Also, thank you @fanboynz for your work on this. One of the things that sets Brave apart from the rest. Much appreciated.

6

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