Mick

Profile

Username:
drmaus
Name:
Mick
Location:
Pittsburgh, PA
Birthday:
01/01
Status:
Not Interested

Stats

Post Reads:
145,213
Posts:
491
Photos:
1
Last Online:
> 30 days ago
View All »

My Friends

> 30 days ago
> 30 days ago
> 30 days ago
> 30 days ago
> 30 days ago
> 30 days ago
> 30 days ago
> 30 days ago

Subscribe

Maus

Computing & Technology > Blogging > Google Stuff
 

Google Stuff

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.

posted on Oct 22, 2019 10:13 AM ()

Comments:

After years of relying on google, I have noticed this.
comment by elderjane on Oct 23, 2019 6:35 AM ()
You're more observant than I am, I only found out about it when a blogger talked about it. I wonder if Google will continue this system or not.
reply by drmaus on Oct 24, 2019 12:14 PM ()
It goes both ways for me - sometimes it's the long version, others, the short version. The second time I did the exact same search that 'genius' link didn't even come up, and I had full urls for the search results. But I expect it to get worse. I googled (hah) to find out what causes this and couldn't understand the answer - something about breadcrumbs, and it seemed to address it from the website owner's view (because that's who asked the question about what caused it) and blame the website owner for somehow causing it.
comment by traveltales on Oct 22, 2019 3:02 PM ()
You got full urls, I didn't expect that. Unless it's a result of cacheing, either by your computer or Google. I'm going to try to use DuckDuckGo more often, since they don't track you and they show the urls.
reply by drmaus on Oct 22, 2019 3:33 PM ()
I very seldom use google for searches though I do use bing and I am sure they are not far behind!!
comment by greatmartin on Oct 22, 2019 2:50 PM ()
For the moment, Bing or DuckDuckGo seem better, since they show what you're clicking on.
reply by drmaus on Oct 22, 2019 3:35 PM ()
I don't search for the unknown all that often. Sometimes I just need to convert a temperature of mileage or something. I depend on AVAST to keep me from getting screwed.
comment by jjoohhnn on Oct 22, 2019 11:36 AM ()
Avast always had a good reputation from what i remember.
reply by drmaus on Oct 22, 2019 3:36 PM ()

Comment on this article   


491 articles found   [ Previous Article ]  [ Next Article ]  [ First ]  [ Last ]