Why won't Google show me a URL for an image search?
July 23, 2015 10:46 AM   Subscribe

When I do a search in Google (in every browser on my Mountain Lion Mac), in the URL field there is the URL for the google search. Of course. If I click on "images," instead of a URL showing, I now just get the search response (ie, searching for "what the hell", instead of showing 'https://google.com/search+whateverblahblahblah' it just shows "what the hell" in the URL field. This is new since yesterday! Any ideas to reset it? Thanks.
posted by betsbillabong to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)
 
Can you take a screenshot of this and post it? It's definitely not happening for me.
posted by showbiz_liz at 11:05 AM on July 23, 2015


Response by poster: Yeah, it wasn't happening for me either yesterday! Actually, I just realized it is also now doing the same for any kind of Google search. Weird and annoying!

Here is a screenshot:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5816146/GOOGLE_IMAGE_SEARCH.png

(Not sure if there's a better way to post an image, but that's a public dropbox linkā€¦)
posted by betsbillabong at 11:25 AM on July 23, 2015


Huh, apparently this is a known thing with Safari. I wonder why it's only happening for you now.
posted by showbiz_liz at 11:40 AM on July 23, 2015


In windows, once you click on a picture, you get a block on the right hand side of the screen that has "visit page" and "view image". If you view the image, you can get the URL from the top of the browserl
posted by SemiSalt at 11:49 AM on July 23, 2015


It may be that you are the subject a chrome field trial
posted by bdc34 at 12:22 PM on July 23, 2015


This has been like this on Chrome on iOS for a while; perhaps Safari is now adapting the same feature.
posted by Sonic_Molson at 3:13 PM on July 23, 2015


Best answer: If you change the default search engine in Safari preferences to Bing or Yahoo, and then go to google.com and do a search you will get the old behaviour.
So this is a feature not a bug, if you copy or bookmark the simple search string it does still use the full URL.
Firefox still allows you to have a separate search box and address bar - the way it should be.
posted by Lanark at 5:02 PM on July 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Lanark - thank you! It didn't even occur to me to copy and paste the words themselves; I just tried and indeed, the URL was copied and pasted.

Pretty confusing feature, though.

Thanks again!
posted by betsbillabong at 4:41 AM on July 24, 2015


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