Is there an option to show the real url when you do search on Safari 6?

Safari 6 integrated an address bar and a search box together. So when you want to search a keyword, you just type into the address box. That's maybe good.

Before, when you type something in the old search box, you were seeing a url that contains all search term as query strings in the old address bar. For example, if you type Safari 6 in the search box, you'll see something like https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=safari+6… in the address bar.

In Safari 6, repeating this experiment, type Safari 6 in the integrated address bar. You'll keep seeing Safari 6 there, not the real URL. This happens even if I go to the search site first and type the keyword into their search. It only happens for your choice of the search engine in the Safari preference. So let's say, I pick "Yahoo" and go to "Google.com", then it shows the real URL.

Is it possible to bypass this annoyance and get Safari 6 to reveal the actual URL?

Solution 1:

Safari maintains this information internally, but I've only been able to make it divulge the actual URL by enabling the web inspector (Option-Command-I) after you have enabled the Debug menu at the bottom of the advanced tab in Safari Preferences (Command-,). You can of course drag the URL out of the search window to get a link (instead of copying which just copies the visible search terms).

You will see the Full URL under the Location disclosure in the bottom right corner of your screen. The only good part of this is the text is copyable once you've navigated and selected it. It might be possible to write a Safari extension to perform this copy, but I have not found one to do this yet.

As provided by Arjan you can also make a bookmark and use JavaScript to retrieve the URL.

javascript:(function(){window.location.href=window.location.href.replace("search?", "#");})()

You might also be interested in gDirectLinks or it's more fully fledged sibling LinkThing which change the way Safari renders google search terms and works with URL handling from google.

Solution 2:

A really simple way I discovered to get around this is this (btw, I'm using Safari 7.1):

1. "Select all" in the address box
2. Open a new Safari window
3. Click in the address box and "paste"

This gives you a URL (a really long URL) you can then drag off and save into a folder, paste elsewhere for reference, etc.