safari
When I google for images of "apple sauce" (without the quotes), Safari's location bar just displays "apple sauce" (without the quotes) rather than the URL leading to Google searching for apple sauce images.
I want to send someone the search URL. How can I get it from Safari?
Safari maintains this information internally, but I've only been able to make it divulge the actual URL by enabling the web inspector (Option-Command-I) after you have enabled the Debug menu at the bottom of the advanced tab in Safari Preferences (Command-,). You can of course drag the URL out of the search window to get a link (instead of copying which just copies the visible search terms).
You will see the Full URL under the Location disclosure in the bottom right corner of your screen. The only good part of this is the text is copyable once you've navigated and selected it. It might be possible to write a Safari extension to perform this copy, but I have not found one to do this yet.
As provided by Arjan you can also make a bookmark and use JavaScript to retrieve the URL.
javascript:(function(){window.location.href=window.location.href.replace("search?", "#");})()
You might also be interested in gDirectLinks or it's more fully fledged sibling LinkThing which change the way Safari renders google search terms and works with URL handling from google.
The AnySearch extension allows you to set any search engine you want.
It achieves it by listening to the beforeSearch event, canceling the default behaviour and checking your settings for your chosen search engine. Then it puts your query into the specified search engine and displays the results.
You could, too, edit the host file, redirecting form any of the default search engines to the one you want, but that wont be so neat.
Best Answer
Like suggested elsewhere, you can drag the search text from the URL bar into some plain text view. However, one can also directly drag it into a (rich text) email or chat message. Or into Google's search field which is conveniently close to Safari's location bar:
(In previous versions, you could drag the magnifying glass icon; in 2016 versions just drag the search text like shown above.)
After dragging into Google's search field, the additional search text is already selected and focussed, ready for Command+C:
(In earlier versions, Safari's location bar will still have focus, and the URL in Google's search input will be gray, not blue. In those versions one could first hit Tab after searching to go into Google's search field, hit Delete to clear it, and then drag the icon. After that, the search field is ready for Command+C as well.)
The Share button to the right of the location bar can also share the URL, but probably only when messaging has been configured:
As an aside: the Google URLs include a lot of irrelevant things, specific to your browser, language, etc. Often, it's enough to use www.google.com#q=elvis+is+alive, or for image search www.google.com#tbm=isch&q=elvis+is+alive, but then one needs to change the spaces into plus-characters to ensure it's clickable. (And one also needs to percent-encode other special characters.) It would be nice if Google would provide some bare sharing link on its own site.