Safari 6.0 and Google Search URLs

Brent Simmons writes about the lack of URLs for Google searches in Safari 6.0:

I asked on Twitter. One way is to drag the magnifying glass into whatever text I’m editing. Another way would be a bookmarklet that gets the current page location. A third way would be an AppleScript script.

I ended up writing a Python script.

From my Mountain Lion review:

That said, there is one aspect to the new smart search field I don’t care for: it no longer displays Google Search URLs after you’ve used it to search for something. So if you want to share a direct link to a Google Search, you’ll need to copy it from the share sheet in either Messages or Mail.

In fiddling with Keyboard Maestro, I built a super-quick macro that grabs the URL of the frontmost Safari window through AppleScript. You can download the macro here, or check out the AppleScript itself if you want to create a system Service with Automator.

As pointed out by user @jaydisc on Twitter, some Apple apps on Mountain Lion can receive the copied search terms as clickable URLs in rich text format. In my tests, only Mail was able to receive search terms in RTF and, apparently, this is a known bug.