

Ask PG: Will HN ever get a search (& memory) friendly url structure? - cjbarber

I think personally, the main advantage of this would be that HN urls that I have saved or that I share with others are immediately clear as to what their content is. What do you guys think?
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tokenadult
How much advantage does that really provide?

If I share an HN link among my Facebook friends, as I sometimes do, a snippet
of the discussion is shown, and that (besides my tagline to the submitted
link) lets people know what to expect. If I share a link in an email, I
generally introduce it to the recipients. What is the use case for changing
the link structure of Hacker News? I'm not sure that "immediately clear" is
guaranteed by all of the user-submitted titles here, for example.

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cjbarber
I thought about it today while writing a google doc where I was adding HN
links - I believe having this would make all those clearer. Though I
understand that adding commentary for all links is a solution there.

Also, this would make it much easier to decipher the links I have sprinkled
through various notes in Evernote.

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nostrademons
You can give human-readable text to links in a Google Doc - that lets you
choose your own title, which would undoubtedly be more readable than a url-
safe string.

Ironically, I find this would be most useful when including links to previous
HN discussions on Hacker News itself, because this is one of the few sites
that doesn't let you put in human-readable text for the links you include.

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timkly
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5464028&title=testi...](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5464028&title=testing)
\- you can just hack it in. maybe someone could put together a simple
bookmarklet to get the title appended to the url

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josso
Oh well… Here is a simple bookmarklet that will append a slug to the url:

    
    
        javascript:history.pushState({}, document.title, document.URL + "&title=" + document.querySelector('.title a').innerText.toLowerCase().replace(/[^\w ]+/g,'').replace(/ +/g,'-'))

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diziet
I think this is done deliberately -- as to not show up on as many google
searches as the site would be showing up otherwise.

