I was looking for a song through Google Search, and noticed the results page shows the URLs too.
Google now displays the URL of a result in green text.
Now, I don’t know about you, but to me the notion of URLs is not that relevant to show it on the visible page. The internet turns around content. Besides, browsers show the URL you’re going to in the status bar (when you’re hovering above the link).
The status bar of a browser.
Now, since the advent of URL shorteners like tinyurl and bit.ly, it might be useful to know where that link points to. Twitter.com solves this problem by showing a tooltip with the resolved address when you hover above a shortened URL. And the bit.ly plug-in shows you even the statistics of their links.
URL expansion on twitter.com
Just to say it’s 2011 and Google added some extra clutter to solve a problem I’ve been trained to solve for years now (looking at the status bar when I click on something).
(The only use-case I see for this is the mobile space: smartphones don’t have hover-finger-detection. Yet.)
(And extra fast scanning/filtering of search results, but website builders should properly use the title tags.)
boskabout 