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Google is shutting down its goo.gl URL shortening service
- mikro2nd 9y agoI guess I was just a little prescient back in 2011, when I wrote of URL-shortening services in a blog post, "let's not forget that these entities have a nasty tendency to vanish". Not that being prescient about the Big G end-of-lifing services is particularly visionary or difficult, tbh. The post[1] was to publicise a small shortener I'd written for myself (Java/JSP solution) -- in many ways deficient and lacking all sorts of features (stats, UI) but it worked well enough for me for a time until I got lazy, got ill, and got rid of the server it was running on. But I was bang on-target about the likelihood of such things disappearing under the waves. I guess it's time to dust it off[2], bring the codebase up to date and get it working again. I'm a bit doubtful about hosting it on, say... Google Compute free-tier or something... for who knows when /that/ service will get taken down. [1] http://onemikro2nd.blogspot.co.za/2011/04/shrtn-url-shortener.html http://onemikro2nd.blogspot.co.za/2011/04/shrtn-url-shortene... [2] https://bitbucket.org/mikro2nd/shrtn https://bitbucket.org/mikro2nd/shrtn
- xiphias 9y agoall existing links will continue to redirect to the intended destination. It would be a PR nightmare for Google if they stopped redirecting existing links, but they won't do that as they're a huge user of the web graph as well.
- mikro2nd 9y agoIndeed, I saw that redirection will continue to work. It wasn't clear to me, though, whether any of the other stuff -- stats, particularly -- will continue to work.
- asaph 9y ago> it worked well enough for me for a time until I got lazy, got ill, and got rid of the server it was running on. But I was bang on-target about the likelihood of such things disappearing... Oh, the irony...
- sethammons 9y agoKinda the opposite of irony. They said these things disappear. Had they said, "but this one won't," then we would be approaching irony.
- asaph 9y agoMy impression was that building his own URL shortenner was undertaken as a mitigation of the risk of other URL shortenners disappearing.
- joshu 9y agoIt has been obvious that they were bad for a while. I called it years before: http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners And no, the answer is not running more shorteners. You are just making the problem worse.
- joefarish 9y ago"While most features of goo.gl will eventually sunset, all existing links will continue to redirect to the intended destination." https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/03/transitioning-google-url-shortener.html https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/03/transitioning-goog...
- samuell 9y agoI hope this doesn't change too. Felt I had to use it to link a humongous wikidata SPARQL query in a (software) research paper recently.
- omeid2 9y agoI think in content intented for long term it is always better to use the canonical address, possibly in a footnote if it is too long. Better yet also include an alternative link to an archive like https://archive.li/ https://archive.li/ or similar.
- mcast 9y agoI hope you added the entire link in an appendix, otherwise it’s not Google’s fault for ruining your paper.
- samuell 9y agoThe query itself is available in a screenshot. Also a pretty periferal part of the paper. Looked/thought hard about options but did not come up with better at the time. But wanted to highlight how important it is for parties starting such services to have a plan for longevity. Hopefully Goog will keep old links going for a long time.
- realworldview 9y agoPlease consider using DOI’s for this http://www.doi.org/factsheets/DOIKeyFacts.html http://www.doi.org/factsheets/DOIKeyFacts.html
- 9y ago
- cstuder 9y agoI've recently came across a use case for an URL shortener (Entering long API calls on mobile devices) and was looking for a self-hosted solution. Any recommendations? (No public shortening service, only admins can create new shortcuts.)
- tscs37 9y agoYourls is pretty good, I use it with Sharex (and Nextcloud) to quickly upload images to the internet.
- dazc 9y ago2nd for Yourls; easy to install and maintain.
- amelius 9y agoI'm looking for a URL shortener that tells me how many users clicked the link.
- ptman 9y agoIs that your only requirement? In that case even my very simple one would be enough: https://github.com/ptman/urlredir https://github.com/ptman/urlredir
- amelius 9y agoOther requirements would be that it is actually hosted somewhere :) and doesn't ever shut down.
- downandout 9y agoBitly does this. Just add a + to the end of any bitly URL to view stats, e.g.: https://bitly.com/J7SNth+ https://bitly.com/J7SNth+
- frou_dh 9y agoWhy not just have a cloud-synced document, from which you can tap/copy the real URLs on the mobile device?
- hliyan 9y agoThis would not be a problem if websites themselves provided shortened URLs for all paths within their domain name: foo.com/2018/03/31/the-title-of-an-article => foo.com/a3ef33
- frou_dh 9y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16722817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16722817 https://news.ycombinator.com/b00b00 https://news.ycombinator.com/b00b00 not very short
- dosshell 9y agoI do not understand. Please say what you mean in your message instead of just dropping some urls:s. For example now, your url:s goes to this submission and an unknown (!?). If you had written what you meant at least I could understand your point.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mintplant 9y agoThey are examples of a long "short URL" following your specification. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16722817 might shorten to https://news.ycombinator.com/b00b00 which is not very short given the length of the hostname.
- C4K3 9y agoPrevious discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16719272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16719272
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- hartator 9y agoA good alternative: https://lc.cx https://lc.cx
- weinzierl 9y agoThe last time I used an URL shortener was in the old days when Twitter still counted every character of the URL against the 140 char limit. I'm curious what use cases URL shortening services have nowadays?
- patio11 9y agoA lot of people use them for tracking. For example, you can use one underlying URL but have several shortened ones for various promotional places (email, Twitter, etc) and then use the analytics for the shortener to see which place is actually sending you traffic.
- sethammons 9y agoI use them in the title / banner box in hipchat as a sticky resources finder for relevant info for that chat room. Display space is limited.
- acjohnson55 9y agoThere are a lot of places where having a compact url is handy. One page I often use them is when putting links in code comments, when I've used a blog post or StackOverflow answer as the basis for some tricky solution to a problem.
- qznc 9y agoI used one for an IRC chat bot, because long URLs in terminal clients suck.
- solarkraft 9y ago- Tracking - Sharing (Looks better when written out [like often social media posts], is easier to remember)
- jawnjawn 9y agoIt is used heavily by spammers to hide url's. Often, 5 or more shorteners (including less-than-reputable ones) are used in a chain.
- sus_007 9y agoDUPE: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16719272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16719272
- cmer 9y agoI'm not sure how you guys feel about this, but personally, I've been avoiding Google services for the last couple of years because I just assume they'll eventually get shut down.
- iforgotpassword 9y agoSame here. Only thing I'm still strongly dependent on is gmail. I don't really think that's going away anytime soon, but out of principle I'd like to move away from it. Takes a lot of energy unfortunately and you probably need to keep a redirect in place for a long time just in case...
- bredren 9y agoIs there a self-hosted web mail service w ux like gmail, that you can migrate to smoothly and pay a license for? I would consider this move. I just assume no one has ux even close. It would take me at least a year to fully transition from one gmail address.
- qznc 9y agoNo afaik. I accepted the loss of usability and moved away anyways.
- solarkraft 9y agoNot self-hosted, but I am very happy with Zoho [0]. They target companies and their free plan includes lots of features like support for your own domain. The web UI is comparable to GMail (indeed in parts I prefer it) and they offer a very good Android app as well. [0]: https://www.zoho.com/mail/ https://www.zoho.com/mail/
- ValentineC 9y agoZoho recently removed IMAP and email forwarding from their free tier (though existing users were grandfathered in), so stay away if you value email portability.
- jwilk 9y agoArchived copy, which works with JS disabled: https://archive.is/r53k9#0% https://archive.is/r53k9#0%
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- gesman 9y agoI used to register and use domain go.gl for my photography business in early 2000’s Was thinking about registering goo.gl just for kicks (it was available back then) but turned off this idea because Greenland would charge $50+ for registering. And it had to be done over the FAX!
- qbaqbaqba 9y agoI really would appreciate a link shortening service automatically creating IPFS mirror!
- SeanKilleen 9y agoIf 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.