When doing a search on Google that returns results with long urls, you'll see an extra space added to the url shown by Google under the description for that listing (the green url). Why that's added there is still a mistery, even since this is been going on since as early as 2003. What's even more of a mistery is that Google doesn't add that space in the SERP url always. I was able to reproduce this by using two different browsers, Maxthon and Opera.
The fact that the space is added or not might depend not on the browser used by on the localization (using Opera might "confused" Google of where I was browsing the web from). The question still remains, why is that space added? One of the answers I came up with is that it's doing that to prevent screen scraping. Screen scraping is a technique used by some computer programs to extract the visible text from another program's output, in this case the Google search results page. Screen scraping is also used by some SEO computer programs to see how you rank for particular searches, so maybe that's what Google is trying to prevent.
However this does not happen for short urls, so this theory doesn't really stand. So another possible explanation is that is doing this so that if you're browsing using a smaller screen (mobile browsing for instance) the url wraps after that space so the "green" url is displayed on two rows in a better way (designwise).
We'll never know for sure why that happens, but this isn't implemented in Yahoo's search engine or Microsoft's Live one (if the url is longer both simply trim it and just display ..., same thing what Google does if the url exceeds 180 characters).
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