It's ridiculous. Google wants to keep users at its domain so much that it invents a whole technology to substitute address bar contents. This shows how harmful it is when a company has a significant market share in several different areas (browsers and search engines).
I hope at least Mozilla doesn't adopt this technology and will show the true URL.
This technology is complicated. Browser vendors have to implement all of this only to please Google.
Last week I blocked Google from my domains (blog: lucb1e.com/!130), hopefully others will follow suit and degrade the search quality until people get better results (at least for some more obscure content) elsewhere, or perhaps until Google notices we are really not okay with their behaviour.
Are you blocking GoogleBot by IP range or User-Agent match? Why aren't you using your robots.txt file to block GoogleBot instead or in addition to your server-side logic?
Robots.txt was my first thought as well, but that is said to not actually block your site from appearing in the results. They'll gather from other sites what the page is about (think <a href=mysite/somepage>how to knit a sweater</a>) and show that as title without page summary. Maybe if it looks like the site is down, they won't bother.
Blocking is based on user agent, they seem to set that reliably and the IP addresses change. You can do some reverse lookup magic but this was way easier than looking up every single IP that visits my site.
This is the exact opposite of "keeping users at its domain". That was the situation _before_ they implemented this standard. Now users will get sent to the publisher's domain instead (via a prefetched page load).
No they don't. The page contents are controlled by the publisher and cryptographically signed so Google can't alter it. Another improvement over the previous situation.
I hope at least Mozilla doesn't adopt this technology and will show the true URL.
This technology is complicated. Browser vendors have to implement all of this only to please Google.