I hate that too, with a passion. Is it still an issue? I think I installed a browser extension to stop it.

Indeed the behavior is still there. It's especially annoying when you have to share links to products on Steam/Amazon etc. with someone. There's no way (without extensions) to mouse-select the original link underneath the result title because they're usually long and get truncated. I end up going to the sites themselves and search from within them.

Why do they do this? To somehow extract something from the associates of a Google user? I think it borders on scummy.

That would be up to the browser's context menu functionality, wouldn't it? I really don't know, but if so, a sub-menu item (or whatever the links are called below the post title) would be sufficient for me.