Mark Baker complains about Google

Maybe you're just easily fooled. Do a "copy link" and paste it.

Matthias,

I did 'Copy Shortcut' (I don't seem to have 'Copy Link' and then pasted into Notepad... And it worked just fine...

Gudge

I just tried googling for "foo" and the first entry in the search looked like this:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=2&url=http%3A//catb.org/%7Eesr/jargon/html/F/foo.html&ei=3owjQ8T_B8OMiAHUo5XIAQ

...but the rest of the entries were normal. FWIW, there were no games being played in the status bar either; that URL above showed up the same in the status bar as it did when I copied it.

Umm, ok I guess I am easily fooled, because there *is* something funky going on.

I just went back to that page again and hovered over the link I posted, and it looked normal in the status bar. But as soon as I right-clicked it and brought up Firefox's menu, the status bar immediately changed to show a mangled URL. I didn't have to copy it or anything. Copying the URL leads to the mangled URL every time.

Tried the same thing in IE, but I don't see the same effect - the URL never gets mangled.

Sure enough, there's some javascript going down here. What Firefox gets is an onmousedown handler for each anchor tag that points to a function called rwt() which rewrites the URL into the mangled form.

From IE, it's a function called clk() that seems to do the same thing. However, the clk() version in IE seems to work more transparently than the Firefox version. This is probably why Gudge and Matthias are seeing different results. I think I can guess which browser Gudge is using ;-)

Keith,

Yup, you guessed right. I am using IE. Does seem odd that Google would behave so differently for the two browsers.

Gudge