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February 28, 2013

The Shortest Google Search URL

What if you want to include a link to a Google search results page and the URL needs to be short? Instead of copying the URL from the address bar and including a lot of unnecessary parameters, you can manually build a simple URL:

http://www.google.com/search?q=test

Obviously, you should replace "test" with your query. If there are multiple keywords, replace space with "+" like this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=test+my+speed

You could drop "www." from the URL:

http://google.com/search?q=test

Google now uses AJAX to load search results, so you can replace "search?" with "#":

http://google.com/#q=test

You can even drop the slash after "google.com" and the URL works in most desktop browsers, but not in mobile browsers. You could also replace "google.com" with "google.ca" or other Google domains, but you'll get different results.

Fortunately, Google owns the googl.com domain and you can use this URL:

http://googl.com/#q=test

12 comments:

  1. g.co/#q=test does not work sadly. :D

    ReplyDelete
  2. Technically, if you've re-based your links to http://, you can omit that also... but it does require you to modify your page source to allow that, and some browsers (MS) have issues with it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. or just use goo.gl to shorten the URLs?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's what I was going to say... goo.gl links surely must be the shortest in general, since the query can still be quite long.

      Delete
  4. Two others that work are http://gogle.com/#q=test http://google.co/#q=test

    ReplyDelete
  5. If you're ok with using third party services, gog.is/test works too.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Is there a simple way to specify an image search ??

    ReplyDelete

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