#Creating a 'Share on Google+' URL with this Dubious Clusterhack
Disclaimer: This is a ridiculous set of hacks. I had fun messing about with this and wanted to share it, but I wouldn't recommend using it for anything important. It may stop working at any time.
tl;dr: Google doesn't support sharing arbitrary URLs via a simple share link, but you can work around it by doing a redirect via Google, like so: https://plus.google.com/share?url=http%3A%2F%2Fgoogle.com%2Fsearch%3FbtnI%3D1%26q%3Dshowstudio%26sourceid%3Dnavclient
Most social sites let you share a link by visiting a special URL, for example:
Twitter. http://twitter.com/home?status=http://showstudio.com
Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://showstudio.com
As far as I know, Google+ doesn't support this. There are some workarounds, several of which are noted at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6676658/share-link-on-google, but none of them seemed to work properly for me.
This one intrigued me though:
Yes, you can.
https://plus.google.com/share?url=YOUR_URL_HERE
Edit: It works only with eff.org.
Someone elsewhere noted that it also works for google.com, and I noticed it seemed to work for any google.com URL, not just the homepage.
So, to craft a google.com URL that redirects to the page you want to share. With a couple of URL parameters you can create an "I'm Feeling Lucky" link that redirects automatically:
http://google.com/search?q=showstudio&btnI=1&sourceid=navclient
URL encode this and pop it on the end of the share link noted above, and it should work:
The bonus is that it seems to actually resolve the redirect, so presents you with the actual title of your site, and allows you to select an image from it:
Obviously, this is presenting Google's top result for your query, so you'll need to be sure you'll come up first! Easy if you're trying to present a link to your homepage - harder if you want to present a specific subpage of your site. You could of course use extra search parameters like site:example.com or inurl:example.com/project/test_project to narrow it down a bit.