Imagine this scenario: you are looking for something by Google it (many of our modern day research was done this way). After you found a good search result that you liked and you want to share it to your friends or save it for future reference. And then you copy the link location, instead of a direct link to the source, you get something like this:
If you read carefully, you can extract the raw URL in the middle. Of course, you will need to do a lot of text editing such as replacing “%2F” to “/”. After the due diligence you will get something like this:
It is painful process if the link happen to have many levels of hierarchy. Actually there are even online tools that help you to do the extraction.
Here is how you can do it easily without any text editing.
This is based on a simple observation that when you hover the link in Firefox or Chrome, you can see the raw URL but when you right click and tried to copy it, it became the google link. If you try the same thing in IE, it is not the case (the hover also show the long google URL). So this approach will work in Firefox and Chrome but not IE (who is using IE anyways?).
Step 1: Press down Right buttom on an empty space in the Google result page and hold it. (Actually any place in the webpage other than the link will work)
Step 2: Move the mouse over to the link and release the Right button. A pop up window will show up you can select the “copy link location”.
Step 3: Congratulations, you already got the raw URL you wanted, do whatever you want with it.
A disclaimer, I did not first come up with the solution. Instead I found through the stackexchange webpage shown above. I just want to re-iterate the steps and confirm what works based on my experience.
Do you have a better way of doing it? Please share with us by leaving your comments below.