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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it what Google does? Try hovering over a search result, and then try copying the URL. It's annoying like hell, btw., especially when you want to copy-paste a link somewhere.

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I was thinking the same thing, even when right clicking and using "Copy link address..." you end up with Google's redirect URL.

There's a firefox addon that fixes it: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/google-search-li...

And a Chrome extension as well:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/remove-google-redi...

I use this as a bookmarklet, it will remove this form of redirect from most links http://pastie.org/5132859

(I should have used a gist. I'm hungry and now I want a pasty)

You can mitigate this with a bookmarklet. Jesse Ruderman's zap events doesn't block onmousedown (which Google uses), but it is easy enough to add it:

https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html#zap_events

Agreed, but that's not what happens to the code in this article -- if you copy+paste it appears as though you are going to www.google.com

So it seems... Google could learn a thing or two; or maybe they decided not to be evil.

I don't know... in practical terms, replacing copy-pasted URLs by redirect links is more evil than leaving them be, IMO.

This is a fairly recent development, isn't it?

I'm sure I've successfully copied links directly from Google's search results before, but I've only recently (past few months?) noticed the URL mangling.

No, this has been the case for as long as I can remember. Years, at least.

I remember when it was not the case (and I remember a period when say 90% of the time you just got straight links, 10% you got redirect links with no Javascript trickery hiding them). But yes, it has been this way for years.

I was wondering if there's an option to disable it somewhere.

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