[jacquesm]

The problem with URIs is that they weren't foreseen as the gateway to a whole slew of web applications, whose URIs can have a lifetime no longer than to serve that one request. There is a continuum here from long lived useful URIs all the way to ephemeral ones.

And then there are the URIs that aren't even made for human consumption, ridiculously long, impossible to parse or pass around. Another class is those that get destroyed on purpose. Your favorite search engine should just link to the content. Instead they link to a script that then forwards you to the content. This has all kinds of privacy implications as well as making it impossible to pass on for instance the link to a pdf document that you have found to a colleague because the link is unusable before you click it and after you click it you end up in a viewer.

[roryokane]

Thankfully, you can fix Google Search not linking directly to search result URLs by installing a browser extension.

For Firefox, I recommend the extension https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-direct.... The extension’s source code: https://github.com/chocolateboy/google-direct.

[vbezhenar]

> Your favorite search engine should just link to the content. Instead they link to a script that then forwards you to the content. This has all kinds of privacy implications as well as making it impossible to pass on for instance the link to a pdf document that you have found to a colleague because the link is unusable before you click it and after you click it you end up in a viewer.

I can copy Google link just fine.

[jacquesm]

Good for you. Now try it a number of times instead of just once and you'll see they insert their 'click count' script in there a very large fraction of the times.

Here is a sample:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

Obtained by right clicking the link to the pdf and then 'copy link location'. What you see is not what is sent to your clipboard.