Often when I try to paste a link from google search into a document, I get a very long link that looks like it contains referring information. How do I get to the simple link, as if I went to the site directly?
Update: I am specifically referring to a case in which I will click on a link to a PDF, it will open in Acrobat Reader, and I will be unable to see the actual URL to which it is pointing. Am I able to see the location at all?
You don't.
The link in google is a link to a google page. That page then auto-redirects to the real page.
The best you could do is to visit the page by clicking on the link then copying the URL from the address bar at the top of the browser.
The only other thing you can do is to parse the url parameter in the string of data that is in the google URL.
...blahblahblah&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Ftesting%2Ffoo.html&blahblahblah...
The bit between the url= and the & is the url-encoded URL of the destination site. Replace all %2F's with / and %3A's with : (they're actually the hexadecimal representation of the ASCII characters / and :) and you get the cleaned up URL - http://www.example.com/testing/foo.html in the case above.
You can use a URL shortner, like bit.ly or a similar service. If you are using Microsoft Word or similar you can insert a hyperlink, and give the link a display title, rather than showing the full URL.
