I still can't understand how this made to frontpage and received this much upvotes. How it was difficult to perform a Google search and what golden key did this tutorial share?
Previously, one of the problems I've seen is Google obfuscates the source on the results page. You can't just grep for what you want since it's not there. They did this in a push to get you to use their search api, but for some odd reason, their search API returns different results than a browser. I find this very useful in that regard.
I tried this a couple of months ago. I could easily extract the url of the result using regex. However, this url was a redirect url with the domain google.com. At this point, I made one more request to this redirect url, followed the redirect chain and easily obtained the actual url of the result.