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Comment by corin_ | Hacker News Reader

Another, in my opinion, great example of the need for subdomains on HN submissions. I surely wasn't the only one who thought this title meant Google were endorsing blackouts?

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Every time there's a submission from google.com someone complains that it looks like an official Google statement and we need subdomains to differentiate. I find this obnoxious, mostly because I have never found this to be any kind of problem but also because you people keep repeating this feature request for every link from google.com.

Probably 99.99% of google.com submissions are not linking to any official Google statements. And when submissions do happen to deal with official Google statements, they tend to be Google+ posts from someone who represents Google. So subdomains won't magically fix anything.

Why can't you just click through if it is ambiguous to you?

I think the point is that there is some ambiguity, and that it's a fairly easy to solve problem. Yeah, I understand it's not the end of the world or really likely to cause serious confusion, but I don't see any downside in showing the subdomain either.

Can't you just hover over the link and see the entire url on the bottom of your browser window?

Not on my phone!

Good point, didn't think of that.

In most cases you can, but why provide the easily accessible domain information at all if it's misleading in so many situations?

Agreed, I've seen a greasemonkey script that can do it, but honestly I can't see a reason why this isn't adopted as standard!

https://gist.github.com/1522657

Because pg has other priorities. All the whining in these threads about this is seriously irritating and derails the topic as it gets voted up past relevant things. Do it in its own post if you need to - which has already been tried several times. Just keep it out of on-topic discussion please.

I use this Greasemonkey script to show the whole URL, except the www.: https://github.com/jcs/better_hn_domains

(Note: I am not jcs)

This https://gist.github.com/1522657 has the slight advantage of working on comment pages as well.

I believe just an exception for plus.google.com needs to be added, as subdomains are shown for some URLs (for example, I see that the subdomains on tumblr are shown).

Better yet, fetch the page in the background, get the microformat info[1] which will contain link to author’s vcard[2] and show something like this instead:

    [Pierre Far]

Google+ is just a platform — who cares for “plus.google.com” if it’s not about Google+.

[1] http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http...

[2] http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http...

Would subdomains even help with posts form +? Google has been using +Pages to communicate lately so even if it was an article from Google it still likely would have said plus.google.com.

Yes, because the URL hint would be "plus.google.com" rather than just "google.com." The latter could link to Groups post, a Google+ post, or a page under the official Google site (google.com).

Each represents a rather type of communication which may or may not originate from Google HQ.

Public Service Announcement: Don't take URLs (shortened or otherwise) as political advice.

Yeah, G+ is eating up the Intenet. Don't understand why people blog there.

But we sure can understand why Google employee posts there.

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