This article is about exported documents, i.e. the point at which you say "I am leaving the ecosystem of my chosen tool".
The wording of the interstitial page says "If you do not want to visit that page..." i.e. it's about whether you expected to visit one website or another. Surely google.com is as 'surprising' to the user as any other page.
I changed some param values, I don't know what they do. But with the original values it remembered my preference. So it seems like they're tracking and storing clicks.
>Surely google.com is as 'surprising' to the user as any other page.
The metric isn't how surprising it is, but how potentially malicious it is. The entire point of the redirect is so the user can make a conscious decision not to visit a potentially-malicious page.
Google.com and Youtube.com, operated by the same people who made the docs tool, make the entirely-fair assumption that neither contain malware.
That being said, I also think it's the wrong argument to make. It makes very little sense that an exported document needs these interstitials. It would make more sense if it applied them to hosted Google Docs, but not things that are self-hosted by an end-user.
The wording of the interstitial page says "If you do not want to visit that page..." i.e. it's about whether you expected to visit one website or another. Surely google.com is as 'surprising' to the user as any other page.
BTW keyhole.com is an old Google-owned domain. From https://infogalactic.com/info/List_of_Google_domains
EDIT:
From my own experiment exporting a docuemnt it renders links as
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://example.com&sa=D&source...
I changed some param values, I don't know what they do. But with the original values it remembered my preference. So it seems like they're tracking and storing clicks.