ps for the downvoter: My comment is entirely serious.

Breaking the web for fun and profit, 101:

The simplest example I can think of is the fact that in a standard google web search, "copy link address" does not give you the actual destination address, rather a google tracking link.

Another: Image attachments in gmail. Now there's this overlay that asks you whether to download, open in google drive, or view in the gmail image viewer (which conveniently has interfaces with a bunch of other google apps I don't care about). Now you might think the google image viewer is nice, but personally I liked my once-upon-a-time ability to just look at images directly in my browser with a single click.

So I gain nothing, google gains everything. They are wresting control of how I access my files, every step of the way.

Greasemonkey script to restore direct links: https://gist.github.com/astanin/3782408

It was worth it to me to install Greasemonkey for this script alone.

I'm increasingly seeing Greasemonkey as a tool for unfucking the web. I've already started writing simple tweaks to the banking UI I use.

About the link thing, DDG uses it as well, but it presents it as "Redirect - Prevent sharing of your search with sites you click on". Although in case of DDG, you can disable that.