For iTunes URLs, You Can Use Google

Have you ever gone to a web page that links to a song, application or video on Apple’s iTunes Store?  If you have iTunes installed, you know that it will pop up and take you to the correct place.  Otherwise, you will get this weird error:

Whether you like or dislike these ‘special’ redirect messages from Apple’s site (or see them at all), they are an effective way of directly linking to an item in the store.  So how do you send someone else a link that redirects to the correct item?

Well, if you have iTunes installed, it’s fairly straight-forward: You right-click (or control-click) on the link and select “Copy iTunes Store URL.”  This will give you a concise URL you can then paste in an email or a blog post to link to that item, which looks something like this:

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewArtist?id=156987

However, if you don’t have iTunes installed, you aren’t completely out of luck.  Google search can actually be a pretty reliable resource for finding the link you are looking for, especially if the search term is fairly unique.  The key here is to include the word phobos in your keyword search along with the search term.  Phobos is the name of Apple’s redirect server, and is actually part of every URL that points to the iTunes Store.

Say for example you wanted to send someone a link to the artist Jason Mraz.  Search in Google for “jason mraz phobos.” You will get a result like this one:

If you ignore the meta-text above and just focus on the green text, this is a direct link to the Jason Mraz category on the iTunes store.  Just copy the green text and paste it in to your email or blog entry and it should work.  If you click on the blue text, Google should eventually redirect you to the same URL that you can copy off of the address bar too.