10 ms·

Transitioning Google URL Shortener to Firebase Dynamic Links

128 points by rey12rey 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
kirubakaran 9y ago
Since they will be continuing to honor existing redirects, do they gain anything by disallowing new redirects? If it is engineering effort they want to save, they can just stop developing new features, right?
- niftich 9y ago
  Continuing to honor existing redirects is a relatively simple gesture of goodwill -- it's absolutely what customers expect, it's good for the web, and doesn't need a lot of ongoing effort. Rather, it looks like they're driving people to a different product intended for a different set of usecases [1]. They want to get out of the generic, commodity web URL shortener business, and drive more of their customers towards more purposeful destination forwarding. [1] https://firebase.google.com/docs/dynamic-links/use-cases/ https://firebase.google.com/docs/dynamic-links/use-cases/
  - duskwuff 9y ago
    Crucially, the new product is unlikely to be available through a web interface (at least, without an account), so Google no longer has to deal with their link shortener being used for spam and fraud.
    - manquer 9y ago
      Spammers would not be dettered by the need to use an API. Besides anyone could build a frontend for accessing the API
- pgeorgi 9y ago
  It's probably maintenance effort they want to save. Once the service is locked and statistics are off (ie mid-2019) the entire site could be replaced with an exported set of static files.
- johan_larson 9y ago
  I'm a bit surprised they are planning to continue to support existing short urls indefinitely. Presumably that will go away at some point. Ain't nothing free.
samspenc 9y ago
Total guess here: In addition to having two products that do the same thing, I'm guessing they may want to distance themselves from goo.gl links since a shortened URL with that domain somehow seems associated with Google and seems more legit (as opposed to, say, a bit.ly or ow.ly link.)
- kyrra 9y ago
  Interesting guess. Google does have a URL shortener for google "official" URLs under the g.co domain. And the goo.gl does get used for certain attacks sometimes. examples of g.co urls: http://g.co/payhelp http://g.co/payhelp http://g.co/recover http://g.co/recover http://g.co/allo http://g.co/allo
- niftich 9y ago
  This is highly unlikely to be true, considering Firebase Dynamic Links also generates URLs where the domain ends in 'goo.gl' [1]. [1] https://firebase.google.com/docs/dynamic-links/create-manually https://firebase.google.com/docs/dynamic-links/create-manual...
russellbeattie 9y ago
I wonder why Google is reusing the Firebase brand so much? It doesn't really fit with messaging (GCM -> FCM) or links, among other functions. Seems like an odd choice, even if the backend infrastructure/team is the same. Reminds me of Microsoft reusing "Surface", or prepending "Live" to everything once upon a time...
- dannyr 9y ago
  This is to woo developers from both platforms especially iOS devs. A Google branding is closely associated with Android.
- niftich 9y ago
  Firebase is their Mobile-Backend-as-a-Service brand. The product they're driving customers to, Firebase Dynamic Links, is not really a web URL shortener, but more of a bridge between URLs and in-app links. In this light, it makes sense.
  - AznHisoka 9y ago
    I thought it was their repo of entities that was used for displaying Google Knowledge results? Or the ecommerce product repo... or am i thinking of totally different things? I feel like there are other google products that end with “Base”
    - traek 9y ago
      That was Freebase, which was acquired by Google for use in their Knowledge Graph.
- saurik 9y ago
  I don't know about the "messaging" one... of the big use cases for Firebase was just to send push notifications for numerous channels, and the tech came literally from usage in a chat system (then called Envolve). I haven't looked at this new URL shortener thing yet, though.
- dubrocks 9y ago
jmgao 9y ago
I'm partial to ShadyURL: http://www.5z8.info/start-trojan_u9a9hm_aohell.exe http://www.5z8.info/start-trojan_u9a9hm_aohell.exe
- forapurpose 9y ago
  Did you link to a malware executable?
  - loeg 9y ago
    > Don't just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frightening.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- resonanttoe 9y ago
  I can't begin to thank you enough for this and how much its going to change all of my online interactions. :D
- notamy 9y ago
  Similar: https://verylegit.link/ https://verylegit.link/
MR4D 9y ago
This has been poorly handled. I got an email for my company yesterday with one of these links. Being security conscious, I hovered over the link and suspected a phishing attack. Given I work in finance, this was the only prudent move I felt I had. Google is going to see a lot of that over the coming weeks if they can’t improve their communication on this.
- techsupporter 9y ago
  > Being security conscious, I hovered over the link and suspected a phishing attack. > Given I work in finance, this was the only prudent move I felt I had. At my place of employment, we are instructed to "hover to uncover" every link in an e-mail. Yet every link I get from virtually any automated source reads something like this: "To accomplish the task you need to accomplish, simply visit us at h t t p s: / / example dot com / some / simple.url.html" Yet the ACTUAL link is: "h t t p : / / linktracker9 . unrelatedentity4 . subdomain . example dot io / asdflkjawsfq3894gfjwerfgouiewjngwskuvhawesri7gfhwe4i7fghwefv / qwerog9f8weh8w4fhw98ry2938hwf?utm_lol=hahaha&utm_more=roflcopter&utm_howabsolutelylongcanwemakethislink=shadyb1zn3zz&phishing=no&itscool=thisis_definitely_not_phishing&utm_feed=buzz" I understand, but do not accept, why every link sending program on the planet insists on doing this. It is broken and wrong.
  - snuxoll 9y ago
    I can't even see the real link because our anti-spam software rewrites every single one (so they all look like https://somesubdomain.mimecast.com/linkcheck?something=as8fgusU https://somesubdomain.mimecast.com/linkcheck?something=as8fg...). Even more annoying it loads the URL before you even get to it, so single use URL's like Salesforce password resets get burned before you can use them (we finally got this fixed with our old Proofpoint setup that did the same nonsense, I haven't pestered them to fix it with Mimecast yet).
  - sixdimensional 9y ago
    You've just given me an interesting idea for an extension to HTML itself - an anchor tag / link type where the text displayed can and must only be equal to the href value of the link. Additionally, any rendering client could render such a link with a special visual cue, perhaps, to help the user understand that the visible link text should equal the link href value and only the link href value. Could just be, maybe you could make an anchor tag which is like, <a href="http://www.google.com"> http://www.google.com"> without a closing tag, and browsers know to render that where the text displayed equals the value of the href. Additionally, clients could detect such links and give them a visual cue to indicate they are "safe(r)" relatively speaking? Just an idea that popped in when you said this.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
yzmtf2008 9y ago
Probably a good chance to inject this here: You can build your own private URL shortener with AWS Lambda, for a dozen cents a month [0]. I've made some modification to it so that it supports customized short name, but the changes are trivial to implement. You could (should?) also probably consider a short domain name to pair with it, but those are also cheap ($10/yr, perhaps depend on the TLD). [0]: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/build-a-serverless-private-url-shortener/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/build-a-serverless-priv...
- fludlight 9y ago
  How fast is this?
  - yzmtf2008 9y ago
    At it's core, this URL shortener is just S3 redirect objects [0], behind a cloudfront CDN. So by "fast", you probably mean one of these things: 1) User clicking on a URL: the latency of this action is mostly determined by the latency of cloudfront, which is pretty fast [1]. (Except in the case of a first-click when cloudfront has to do a pull from S3, which is also not bad [1]) 2) Creation of a new short URL: this action is the execution of a lambda function, which in my experience is ~1s in cold-start scenarios, and near instant otherwise. [0]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/how-to-page-redirect.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/how-to-page-... [1]: https://www.quora.com/What-are-typical-latencies-for-static-content-in-S3-vs-Cloudfront https://www.quora.com/What-are-typical-latencies-for-static-...
- jasonjayr 9y ago
  URL Shorteners break the Internet[0] (2009) With Google Or Twitter, at least, they have some semblance of permanence, but with everyone hosting their own private shortener, will just lead to madness. [0]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/url-shorteners-destroying-the-web-since-2002/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/url-shorteners-destroying-the-...
  - smelendez 9y ago
jakeogh 9y ago
URL shorteners accelerate linkrot.
question_that 9y ago
Google can't even keep a URL shortener working? Who is in charge over there?
OnlyRepliesToBS 9y ago
Rug pulled.
sethammons 9y ago
In regards to the shortener replacement, it might be nice for app developers, but as a user, I loathe when a link that can go to a website tries to bring me to the app install. I don't want to install your likely crappy, less featurefull app.
smarx007 9y ago
Google should give the whole dump of the redirects to the Internet Archive (or at least stop banning their crawlers) https://archive.org/details/301works https://archive.org/details/301works
SeanKilleen 9y ago
If you want a free OSS URL shortener for your own domain name, I built a simple one at http://xluh.co/repo http://xluh.co/repo. Will be expanding on it in the future.

128 points by rey12rey 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Since they will be continuing to honor existing redirects, do they gain anything by disallowing new redirects? If it is engineering effort they want to save, they can just stop developing new features, right?

niftich 9y ago
Continuing to honor existing redirects is a relatively simple gesture of goodwill -- it's absolutely what customers expect, it's good for the web, and doesn't need a lot of ongoing effort. Rather, it looks like they're driving people to a different product intended for a different set of usecases [1]. They want to get out of the generic, commodity web URL shortener business, and drive more of their customers towards more purposeful destination forwarding. [1] https://firebase.google.com/docs/dynamic-links/use-cases/ https://firebase.google.com/docs/dynamic-links/use-cases/
- duskwuff 9y ago
  Crucially, the new product is unlikely to be available through a web interface (at least, without an account), so Google no longer has to deal with their link shortener being used for spam and fraud.
  - manquer 9y ago
    Spammers would not be dettered by the need to use an API. Besides anyone could build a frontend for accessing the API
pgeorgi 9y ago
It's probably maintenance effort they want to save. Once the service is locked and statistics are off (ie mid-2019) the entire site could be replaced with an exported set of static files.
johan_larson 9y ago
I'm a bit surprised they are planning to continue to support existing short urls indefinitely. Presumably that will go away at some point. Ain't nothing free.

samspenc 9y ago

Total guess here: In addition to having two products that do the same thing, I'm guessing they may want to distance themselves from goo.gl links since a shortened URL with that domain somehow seems associated with Google and seems more legit (as opposed to, say, a bit.ly or ow.ly link.)

kyrra 9y ago
Interesting guess. Google does have a URL shortener for google "official" URLs under the g.co domain. And the goo.gl does get used for certain attacks sometimes. examples of g.co urls: http://g.co/payhelp http://g.co/payhelp http://g.co/recover http://g.co/recover http://g.co/allo http://g.co/allo
niftich 9y ago
This is highly unlikely to be true, considering Firebase Dynamic Links also generates URLs where the domain ends in 'goo.gl' [1]. [1] https://firebase.google.com/docs/dynamic-links/create-manually https://firebase.google.com/docs/dynamic-links/create-manual...

russellbeattie 9y ago

I wonder why Google is reusing the Firebase brand so much? It doesn't really fit with messaging (GCM -> FCM) or links, among other functions. Seems like an odd choice, even if the backend infrastructure/team is the same. Reminds me of Microsoft reusing "Surface", or prepending "Live" to everything once upon a time...

dannyr 9y ago
This is to woo developers from both platforms especially iOS devs. A Google branding is closely associated with Android.
niftich 9y ago
Firebase is their Mobile-Backend-as-a-Service brand. The product they're driving customers to, Firebase Dynamic Links, is not really a web URL shortener, but more of a bridge between URLs and in-app links. In this light, it makes sense.
- AznHisoka 9y ago
  I thought it was their repo of entities that was used for displaying Google Knowledge results? Or the ecommerce product repo... or am i thinking of totally different things? I feel like there are other google products that end with “Base”
  - traek 9y ago
    That was Freebase, which was acquired by Google for use in their Knowledge Graph.
saurik 9y ago
I don't know about the "messaging" one... of the big use cases for Firebase was just to send push notifications for numerous channels, and the tech came literally from usage in a chat system (then called Envolve). I haven't looked at this new URL shortener thing yet, though.
dubrocks 9y ago

jmgao 9y ago

I'm partial to ShadyURL: http://www.5z8.info/start-trojan_u9a9hm_aohell.exe http://www.5z8.info/start-trojan_u9a9hm_aohell.exe

forapurpose 9y ago
Did you link to a malware executable?
- loeg 9y ago
  > Don't just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frightening.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
resonanttoe 9y ago
I can't begin to thank you enough for this and how much its going to change all of my online interactions. :D
notamy 9y ago
Similar: https://verylegit.link/ https://verylegit.link/

MR4D 9y ago

This has been poorly handled. I got an email for my company yesterday with one of these links. Being security conscious, I hovered over the link and suspected a phishing attack. Given I work in finance, this was the only prudent move I felt I had. Google is going to see a lot of that over the coming weeks if they can’t improve their communication on this.

techsupporter 9y ago
> Being security conscious, I hovered over the link and suspected a phishing attack. > Given I work in finance, this was the only prudent move I felt I had. At my place of employment, we are instructed to "hover to uncover" every link in an e-mail. Yet every link I get from virtually any automated source reads something like this: "To accomplish the task you need to accomplish, simply visit us at h t t p s: / / example dot com / some / simple.url.html" Yet the ACTUAL link is: "h t t p : / / linktracker9 . unrelatedentity4 . subdomain . example dot io / asdflkjawsfq3894gfjwerfgouiewjngwskuvhawesri7gfhwe4i7fghwefv / qwerog9f8weh8w4fhw98ry2938hwf?utm_lol=hahaha&utm_more=roflcopter&utm_howabsolutelylongcanwemakethislink=shadyb1zn3zz&phishing=no&itscool=thisis_definitely_not_phishing&utm_feed=buzz" I understand, but do not accept, why every link sending program on the planet insists on doing this. It is broken and wrong.
- snuxoll 9y ago
  I can't even see the real link because our anti-spam software rewrites every single one (so they all look like https://somesubdomain.mimecast.com/linkcheck?something=as8fgusU https://somesubdomain.mimecast.com/linkcheck?something=as8fg...). Even more annoying it loads the URL before you even get to it, so single use URL's like Salesforce password resets get burned before you can use them (we finally got this fixed with our old Proofpoint setup that did the same nonsense, I haven't pestered them to fix it with Mimecast yet).
- sixdimensional 9y ago
  You've just given me an interesting idea for an extension to HTML itself - an anchor tag / link type where the text displayed can and must only be equal to the href value of the link. Additionally, any rendering client could render such a link with a special visual cue, perhaps, to help the user understand that the visible link text should equal the link href value and only the link href value. Could just be, maybe you could make an anchor tag which is like, <a href="http://www.google.com"> http://www.google.com"> without a closing tag, and browsers know to render that where the text displayed equals the value of the href. Additionally, clients could detect such links and give them a visual cue to indicate they are "safe(r)" relatively speaking? Just an idea that popped in when you said this.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

yzmtf2008 9y ago

Probably a good chance to inject this here: You can build your own private URL shortener with AWS Lambda, for a dozen cents a month [0]. I've made some modification to it so that it supports customized short name, but the changes are trivial to implement. You could (should?) also probably consider a short domain name to pair with it, but those are also cheap ($10/yr, perhaps depend on the TLD). [0]: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/build-a-serverless-private-url-shortener/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/build-a-serverless-priv...

fludlight 9y ago
How fast is this?
- yzmtf2008 9y ago
  At it's core, this URL shortener is just S3 redirect objects [0], behind a cloudfront CDN. So by "fast", you probably mean one of these things: 1) User clicking on a URL: the latency of this action is mostly determined by the latency of cloudfront, which is pretty fast [1]. (Except in the case of a first-click when cloudfront has to do a pull from S3, which is also not bad [1]) 2) Creation of a new short URL: this action is the execution of a lambda function, which in my experience is ~1s in cold-start scenarios, and near instant otherwise. [0]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/how-to-page-redirect.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/how-to-page-... [1]: https://www.quora.com/What-are-typical-latencies-for-static-content-in-S3-vs-Cloudfront https://www.quora.com/What-are-typical-latencies-for-static-...
jasonjayr 9y ago
URL Shorteners break the Internet[0] (2009) With Google Or Twitter, at least, they have some semblance of permanence, but with everyone hosting their own private shortener, will just lead to madness. [0]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/url-shorteners-destroying-the-web-since-2002/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/url-shorteners-destroying-the-...
- smelendez 9y ago

jakeogh 9y ago

URL shorteners accelerate linkrot.

question_that 9y ago

Google can't even keep a URL shortener working? Who is in charge over there?

OnlyRepliesToBS 9y ago

Rug pulled.

sethammons 9y ago

In regards to the shortener replacement, it might be nice for app developers, but as a user, I loathe when a link that can go to a website tries to bring me to the app install. I don't want to install your likely crappy, less featurefull app.

smarx007 9y ago

Google should give the whole dump of the redirects to the Internet Archive (or at least stop banning their crawlers) https://archive.org/details/301works https://archive.org/details/301works

SeanKilleen 9y ago

If you want a free OSS URL shortener for your own domain name, I built a simple one at http://xluh.co/repo http://xluh.co/repo. Will be expanding on it in the future.