URLs for Google search results are lengthy and messy. I think it’s best to link to the actual destination for a variety of reasons. And I vaguely recall a mod voicing a similar preference (although please correct me if I’m wrong.) If the search result links to a PDF, my PC’s browser opens this in a new browser tab, from which I can copy and paste the URL for the file. However, on my phone, clicking the search result link just results in downloading the file.
Is there an easy way to find the file’s URL when on my phone? This is Android/Chrome if that matters.
is a report on housing inventory in SF. The link is:
…google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://default.sfplanning.org/publications_reports/2018_Housing_Inventory.pdf&ved=[lengthy string]
Yes, the main reason being that google doesn’t show the same results to everyone. Something that shows up immediately on your search results might not show up at all on someone else’s search results.
Once you’ve done a google search, you can turn off personalized results by clicking on Settings → Search Settings then scroll down to Use Private Results and select Do Not Use Private Results instead.
It’s also a good idea to mark PDF files as such (put PDF Warning or something similar near the link in your post). Some people think that this is outdated, because the issue with PDF files used to be that they took a really long time to download over a slow modem. That’s not an issue these days, but PDF warnings are still necessary since a lot of mobile devices don’t handle PDF files very well.