Hacker News Reader

Comment by globalpanic | Hacker News Reader

why does the link go to ft.com, rather than google.com (the domain listed after the link)

When you search Google and copy a link from results page, thats what you get. Links are going through google.com and redirected to the site.

This is probably what author did. :/

It's a clever trick. Unfortunately, it breaks the referential integrity of the post. I don't think we can allow it as the submission url, for the same reason we don't allow link shorteners. People who are already posting links to Google searches in comments, though, might want to post these instead.

For those reading this later, the submitted url was http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd...

Quite a few of your comments about editorial decisions (changing URL, changing title) include a note about what the original was. I really like that, it helps people make sense of the conversation.

The only problem is now when you click on the submission link you can't view the article because you need a FT subscription. If you clicked the link that sends you via Google you can view the article due to the FT allowing limited free views via search engines.

Yes—that's why the trick is clever. But this has been the situation for a long time, and much as we're all annoyed by the annoyance, it would clearly be inappropriate to have all paywalled links show up in HN as "google.com". If people want to post links like this in comments, that wouldn't be a big deviation from current practice.

Maybe, in cases where the initial URL submitted redirects, the title should show two domains: the initial domain, and the final domain reached when the entire redirect chain is followed. Or we could try to convince the HN community to favour other sources over FT; this story, in particular, isn't short of write-ups elsewhere.

EDIT: BTW, I can view the article. Is that because I'm coming from outside the US?

This way you can skip the FT paywall, since it looks like you're coming from search or google news. It exploits the daily allowance of free articles shown to users coming from the search engine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com