Hacker News Reader

If you want to see where Google search results really point to, you can right click it and then hover over it to get the real destination... it's been like this for 15+ years (google changes the destination on-click).

View on HN

Thanks, I'll be sure to explain this to all my friends and family, right after I teach them what onclick, "real destination", "hover", etc. mean.

I think that it is pretty screwed up that browsers allow this "feature"...

Just checked; and while they did indeed use to change the URL (on mousedown (!) - which was infuriating, because right-clicking to copy URLs produced a mess I'd then have to pass to data:text/plain,... in a new tab to extract the URL-encoded... agh), they currently really do just leave the link alone now.

They just fire off a request to google.com/url?... to track the click before letting you on your merry way.

Sigh

Reply on news.ycombinator.com