Okay, this is something not earth-shattering — not even earth-nudging — to most people. But anyone who goes online should take note of it.
If you tend to do a lot of Google searches, you might want to take a bit more care before clicking on results. Google has stopped showing the entire url of a website in the results, instead they show “breadcrumbs.†You'll see part of the web address, then an arrow, then a subsection of the url, maybe more arrows, and often you are not shown the end of the url at all.
The problem is, you need to see a full url to know where you're going, especially the end of it. Some web addresses you may not want to heedlessly trust to click on, like maybe a domain ending in .ru that you don’t know, which would be a website out of Russia.
Example: I searched for “foxes song lyrics†(I did not type in the quotes) and this page of results came up:
If I hold my mouse over the link "Foxes Lyrics, Songs, and Albums | Genius" and look down at the bottom-left of my screen, I can see the entire url, which is: https://genius.com/artists/Foxes.
But Google shows me only this: https://genius.com > F
The line at the bottom-left of your window displaying the url is called the link hover status bar, and if you use Chrome, you can make sure it's there by checking that your browser is set to “show status bar†by going to Chrome Preferences. For those using Windows 10, I imagine your browser is set already to show it, and you probably don’t ever want to disable that.
Google is taking away the decision-making from you. They're making you depend on Google to determine that a link is the one you want, even when you can't see it. They're helping us get lazier and less knowledgeable. Someone compared it to cell phone users who don't remember any of their friends' phone numbers, because they rely on their phone to hold them.
Some webmasters and internet businesspeople are suggesting maybe it’s time to kill Google. This is dreaming, of course, but they’re really upset. This is only the most recent of aggressive, strange, internet-hurting moves Google has made in recent years.
Anyway, I’m going to get in the habit of hovering the mouse over a link, & looking at the full url, before I actually click.