How can I copy a Google search URL from Safari?

Question

When I google for images of "apple sauce" (without the quotes), Safari's location bar just displays "apple sauce" (without the quotes) rather than the URL leading to Google searching for apple sauce images.

I want to send someone the search URL. How can I get it from Safari?

Answer 1

Like suggested elsewhere, you can drag the magnifying glass into some plain text view. However, one can also directly drag it into a (rich text) email or chat message. Or into Google's search field which is conveniently close to Safari's location bar:

After dragging into Google's search field, Safari's location bar is still focussed. But in the search field only the URL is selected, hence easily copied when right-clicking that gray selection:

One could also first hit Tab after searching (to go into the search field), hit Delete to clear it, and then drag the icon. After that, the search field is ready for Command+C:

When using Messages (formerly known as iChat), the Share button at the left of the location bar can also share the URL:

As an aside: the Google URLs include a lot of irrelevant things, specific to your browser, language, etc. Often, it's enough to use www.google.com#q=elvis+is+alive, or for image search www.google.com#tbm=isch&q=elvis+is+alive, but then one needs to change the spaces into plus-characters to ensure it's clickable. (And one also needs to percent-encode other special characters.) It would be nice if Google would provide some bare sharing link on its own site.

Answer 2

You could also drag the favicon to a plain text view.

Or assign a shortcut to a script like this:

tell application "Safari" to URL of document 1
set the clipboard to result

Answer 3

It's not a very elegant solution, but you can make a bookmarklet that will open a pop-up dialog with a copiable version of the URL.

To do this, bookmark any page you happen to have handy, then open the Bookmarks manager (Bookmarks > Show All Bookmarks), and edit the address of that bookmark to be javascript:alert(location.href);. Change the name to whatever you want.

Then when you click it, you should get a popup that looks like this:

Answer 4

I've created a Safari Extension: Get URL that highlights the current URL. It's less invasive than a bookmarklet and it's pre-selected, too.