Tuesday, October 1, 2013

URL redirection in Google searches...

It annoys me a lot when I search for a PDF document using Google because I need a link to the specific document and what I get is URL that is rewritten so that I can not right click and select Copy link location... Note that I disabled PDF opening within a browser, but PDFs are not the only thing I'm having a problem with. Sometimes, when links are short enough I can manually copy a link from beneath linked title, but in general links are too long, and thus shortened using three dots.

It took me some time to find a solution, but in the end it turned out to be relatively simple. What I had to do is turn off web history and the links were not obfuscated any more. To turn off Web history, when search results are shown, click on the wheel in the right upper corner and select Web History from drop down menu. Then again click on a wheel and now select Settings. Finally, click on the Turn off button.

Now, I would like to have a history of what I was doing (for my personal use, of course!) but when the price is this annoyance with links, I opted to turn it off.

UPDATE: It turns out that this doesn't help! Google still obfuscates links and I'm still searching for a solution...

I realized that, at first, it did help, but then again links become obfuscated. So, I continued search on the Internet and found the following page that explains what's going on (there is also another page for the same script). On the script's page you can click on the Install button in the upper right corner which will install Greasemonkey script that disables link obfuscation. Obviously, you have to have Greasemonkey installed. In case you are using Chrome, there is a link that takes you to extension's home page on a Chrome web store.

So, I think I finally solved this annoyance. And yes, I turned on Web history tracking on Google again.

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scientist, consultant, security specialist, networking guy, system administrator, philosopher ;)

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