> We understand these links are embedded in countless documents, videos, posts and more, and we appreciate the input received.
How did they think the links were being used?
Also helps that they are in a culture which does not mind killing services on a whim.
I doubt it was a cost-driven decision on the basis of running the servers. My guess would be that it was a security and maintenance burden that nobody wanted.
They also might have wanted to use the domain for something else.
Then they should also be okay for keeping the goo.gl links honestly.
Sounds kinda bad for some good will but this is literally google, the one thing google is notorious for is killing their products.
For company running GCP and giving things like Colab TPUs free the costs of running a URL service would be trivial rounding number at best
Like other things spun down there must not be value in the links.
Can't dig this document up right now, but in their Chrome dev process they say something along these lines: "even if a ferie is used by 0.01% of users, at scale that's a lot of users . Don't remove until you've made solely due impost is negligible".
At Google scale I'm surprised [1] this is not applied everywhere.
[1] Well, not that surprised
This is exactly why many big companies like Amazon, Google and Mozilla still support TLSv1.0, for example, whereas all the fancy websites would return an error unless you're using TLSv1.3 as if their life depends on it.
In fact, I just checked a few seconds ago with `lynx`, and Google Search even still works on plain old HTTP without the "S", too — no TLS required whatsoever to start with.
Most people are very surprised by this revelation, and many don't even believe it, because it's difficult to reproduce this with a normal desktop browser, apart from lynx.
But this also shows just out how out of touch Walmart's digital presence really is, because somehow they deem themselves to be important enough to mandate TLSv1.2 and the very latest browsers unlike all the major ecommerce heavyweights, and deny service to anyone who doesn't have the latest device with all the latest updates installed, breaking even the slightly outdated browsers even if they do support TLSv1.2.
https://www.auslogics.com/en/articles/is-it-bad-that-google-...
Not only are things evolving internally within Google, laws are evolving externally and must be followed.
Not knowing all the details motivating this surprising decision, from the outside, I'd expect this to be an easy "Don't Be Evil" call:
"If we don't want to make new links, we can stop taking them (with advance warning, for any automation clients). But we mustn't throw away this information that was entrusted to us, and must keep it organized/accessible. We're Google. We can do it. Oddly, maybe even with less effort than shutting it down would take."
That someone made a poor decision to rely on anything made by Google.
Google has a number of internal processes that effectively make it impossible to run legacy code without an engineering team just to integrate breaking upstream API changes, of which there are many. Imagine Google as an OS, and every few years you need to upgrade from, say, Google 8 to Google 9, and there's zero API or ABI stability so you have to rewrite every app built on Google. Everyone is on an upgrade treadmill. And you can't decide not to get on that treadmill either because everything built at Google is expected to launch at scale on Google's shitty[0]-ass infrastructure.
[0] In the same sense that Intel's EDA tools were absolutely fantastic when they made them and are holding the company back now
It's just not an accurate view of how the world works.
Look at what happened to their search results over the years and you'll understand.
1. Years ago, Acme Corp sets up an FAQ page and creates a goo.gl link to the FAQ.
2. Acme goes out of business. They take the website down, but the goo.gl link is still accessible on some old third-party content, like social media posts.
3. Eventually, the domain registration lapses, and a bad actor takes over the domain.
4. Someone stumbles across a goo.gl link in a reddit thread from a decade ago and clicks it. Instead of going to Acme, they now go to a malicious site full of malware.
With the new policy, if enough time has passed without anyone clicking on the link, then Google will deactivate it, and the user in step 4 would now get a 404 from Google instead.
Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44683481 - July 2025 (219 comments)
Google URL Shortener links will no longer be available - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40998549 - July 2024 (49 comments)
Is that the same shortening platform running it?
And also does this have something to do with the .gl TLD? Greenland? A redirect to share.google would be fine
Inactive links? There is no such thing. Research papers written a decade ago, you read, and want to click. Now you cannot, unless the data is popular.
If they're keeping the service alive, then keep it alive.
I for one would think twice to rely too much on any of their services.
Apparently they measured it once by running a map-reduce or equivalent.
I don’t see why they couldn’t measure it again. Maybe they don’t want it to be gamed, but why?
But just a guess.
Shortened or not, they change, disappear, get redirected, all the time. There was once an idea that a URL was (or should be) a permanent reference, but to the extent that was ever true it's long in the past.
The closest thing we might have to that is an Internet Archive link.
Otherwise, don't cite URLs. Cite authors, titles, keywords, and dates, and maybe a search engine will turn up the document, if it exists at all.
Fwiw, I wrote and hosted my own URL shortener, also embeddable in applications.
- Tinyurl.com, launched in 2002, currently 23 years old
- Urly.it, launched in 2009, currently 16 years old
- Bitly.com, also launched in 2009
So yes, some services survived a long time.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier
I think I might be doing a self plug here, so pardon me but I am pretty sure that I can create something like a link shortener which can last essentially permanent, it has to do with crypto (I don't adore it as an investment, I must make it absolutely clear)
But basically I have created nanotimestamps which can embed some data in nano blockchain and that data could theoretically be a link..
Now the problem is that the link would atleast either be a transaction id which is big or some sort of seed passphrase...
So no, its not as easy as some passphrase but I am pretty sure that nano isn't going to dissolve, last time I checked it has 60 nodes and anyone can host a node and did I mention all of this for completely free.. (I mean, there is no gas fees in nano, which is why I picked it)
I am not associated with the nano team and it would actually be sort of put their system on strain if we do actually use it in this way but I mean their system allows for it .. so why not cheat the system
Tldr: I am pretty sure that I can build one which can really survive a really long time, decentralized based link shortener but the trade off is that the shortened link might actually become larger than original link. I can still think of a way to actually shorten it though
Like I just thought that nano has a way to catalogue transactions in time so its theoretically possible that we can catalogue some transactions from time, and so basically its just the nth number of transaction and that n could be something like 1000232
and so it could be test.org/1000232 could lead to something like youtube rickroll. Could theoretically be possible, If literally anybody is interested, I can create a basic prototype since I am just so proud really that I created some decent "innovation" in some space that I am not even familiar with (I ain't no crypto wizard)
I'll never use a Google product again.
As we already have a PostgreSQL database server, thecost of running this is extremely low, and we aren't concerned about GDPR (etc) issues with using a third-party site.
I don't know if anyone should use a URL shortener or not ... but if you do ...
"Oh By"[1] will be around in thirty years.
Links will not be "purged". Users won't be tracked. Ads won't be served.
[1] https://0x.co
How can you (or I) know that?
What normal person would find this glove and result in it being returned to its owner? Even if "0x.co" was written too, I think most people wouldn't understand it to be a URL.
