Anyone notice that Yahoo is displaying truncated URLs under results?

[NicoleA]

Say the site is www.example.com/shirts/sale/clearance, it'll only show up as www.example.xom/shirts under the clickable result. I wonder, if this is on purpose, if they think it just looks neater or if it's to cut down on scraping or something like that. Hopefully it won't be around as long as that 'page title in links replaced with most commonly used anchor text in lowercase' issue.

Since Yahoo has different redirects for the same URL, you can get the same page in different searches and your browser will never let you know that you've already been there. So if the titles start to look similar, a quick glance down at the displayed URL isn't going to be as much of a clue anymore. That could be a real problem if your looking for something covered extensively on a site like Digg.

[edited by: martinibuster at 5:55 am (utc) on June 1, 2007]
[edit reason] examplified URL. Example.com is for examples. ;) [/edit]

[LunaC]

I only did a few quick searches to find what you mean, but I'm not finding any. Perhaps it's only on select results?

As for Yahoo using a redirect and not being able to tell if I've visited that site or not, I use a Greasemonkey script to strip out the redirect for that exact reason. It's called Yahoo! Redirect Remover if you want to search for it. Very handy at times.

(I just took a look to make sure the script is still available, there's 1 version that works and another that doesn't at the script archive, so read the user comments to find the right one if you decide to try it.)

[NicoleA]

Yeah, it seems that Yahoo was only doing it for a short while but it was definitely on all the searches I tried, even ones that weren't remotely commercial. I tried a lot of searches before posting that.

Oh and thanks for the script recommendation. Yahoo's redirect system is very annoying.

[edited by: NicoleA at 10:52 pm (utc) on June 4, 2007]

[blend27]

1. MSN does the same thing.
2. For couple of month now.
3. I think it is for Scraper Control.
4. Once the scrapers get the URL on their site(truncated) all big 3 SEs are trying to index truncated URL, which generates DUP issues once in a while if urls are not rewritten properly