17 ms·

Google URL shortener available to the public

153 points by stevefink 16y ago

stevefink 16y ago
I know there's a plethora of URL shorteners these days, and most platform providers (eg: Twitter) are introducing their own so they can harvest analytics themselves. For whatever reason though, I keep trusting Google with all of my most personal information. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, but I have a feeling this will become my standard URL shortener just as Google Apps has become my standard for email, invoicing customers, document management and scheduling. Not to mention Google Reader for having information on all the RSS feeds I visit and Google's search knowing what links I am visiting daily, and probably thirty other products I'm using that stores my information on their servers.
- jakerocheleau 16y ago
  yeah same here it seems like my entire life is run through Google these days. I just assume they have so much data there's no way they could possibly care about what I'm doing. I could be very wrong, though.
- brown9-2 16y ago
  This is a tangent but: how do you invoice customers with Google Apps?
  - stevefink 16y ago
    I actually started my invoicing life with Zoho Invoice. They have since become available on Google Apps, which is super convenient for me, as a Google Apps user: http://www.zoho.com/invoice/zohoinvoice-for-googleapps.html http://www.zoho.com/invoice/zohoinvoice-for-googleapps.html
  - fragmede 16y ago
    I'm guessing either Google Docs, or the Apps marketplace (http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/ http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/).
andymoe 16y ago
Nice simple public stats: http://goo.gl/info/Jvhu#two_hours http://goo.gl/info/Jvhu#two_hours Not a huge fan of the flash chart though. http://goo.gl/Jvhu http://goo.gl/Jvhu http://goo.gl/Jvhu.qr http://goo.gl/Jvhu.qr EDIT: Better graph
- redorb 16y ago
  the chart looks to be a hang-over from google.com/finance; I like the interactivity of it... I'm sure they will replace it with a html5/canvas solution as soon as they feel the adoption is worth it (for those alternatives)
- nikhilgk 16y ago
  That first link just gave us some analytics about the people here on HN. Offtopic: It reported Chrome on Ubuntu as Browsers: Ubuntu
  - andymoe 16y ago
    Yeah, I thought the browser stats for HN people was interesting as well. We love Chrome and apparently one person likes news.ycombinator.org.
- raphar 16y ago
  Strange... : I clicked in the above url. Then I copied the resulting url (http://www.magicbeef.com/ http://www.magicbeef.com/) After pasting it in google service, it produced a different short url: http://goo.gl/YH1c http://goo.gl/YH1c I first assumed that every destination would render an unique short url, but thats not the case. This way google knows the full stats of http://www.magicbeef.com/ http://www.magicbeef.com/. But you can only know the real stats if you know ALL the short urls pointing to it. :) EDIT: I my short url stats page theres a notice: "119 total clicks on all goo.gl short URLs pointing to this long URL" EDIT: Notice the browser stats of the link (http://goo.gl/info/Jvhu http://goo.gl/info/Jvhu) Almost NO IE. Also less than a half windows.
  - netaddict 16y ago
cosgroveb 16y ago
Interesting that all click analytics are public...
- jonknee 16y ago
  Same for Bit.ly...
jnoller 16y ago
Ugh. Google entering this pretty much wipes out the space - companies like bit.ly are going to need to work on seriously differentiating themselves from the pack, and even then I don't think they're long for the world. I can honestly say I hope to never be in a market - or working on a product - where google suddenly decides to enter the game. Even if their offering sucks, or is broken, it sucks all the air out of the room because it's OMG Google.
- Lewisham 16y ago
  I don't think anyone really believed that something you can hack together in twenty minutes, where your business plan is completely based on "for as long as Twitter doesn't do one", really counts as a "space". Anyone who invested in it deserved to get burned. bit.ly were working on partnerships with publishers as their means of getting some monetization, but that's all I've really seen. I'd prefer the Google one to the others, because at least I have some guarantee that the Google one won't go away.
  - cadr 16y ago
    Like Wave didn't go away?
    - iheartmemcache 16y ago
      To be fair, Wave is still functional and Google announced intentions of releasing "Wave in a Box" (1). And they have explicitly said they'll provide a method to export existing data. Either way, their decommissioning of Wave is a lot more responsible than, say, what Xmarks is doing. I trust Google a lot more than a fly-by-night startup to gracefully shutdown their services. (1) http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-source-next-steps-wave-in-box.html http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-source-n...
  - trezor 16y ago
    where your business plan is completely based on "for as long as Twitter doesn't do one" From what I could tell from the last emails sent from twitter, they are doing one. I wrote a very short blog-post on that since I was surprised nobody else seemed to notice: http://jostein.kjonigsen.net/articles/166/Twitter_finally_kills_URL_shortening__almost_.aspx http://jostein.kjonigsen.net/articles/166/Twitter_finally_ki...
fletchowns 16y ago
I wonder what the web will be like in 10 years when most of these URL shorteners don't exist anymore and we're just left with a web full of links that go nowhere. I'm sure the Google one will survive, seems like we shouldn't have to use these URL shorteners at all though.
- jberryman 16y ago
  i agree with you, but how many of those unshortened links do you think will exist 10 years from now? i think the web is like a brain in which memory is active, not static. it`s just a bit too young for that to be obvious.
  - drv 16y ago
    At least the unshortened links have a chance of being scraped by things like archive.org; I wonder if it scrapes anything meaningful from the popular URL shorteners.
    - bigfudge 16y ago
      Actually, scraping only links from shorteners would be a a good strategy form preserving what is worth preserving.
      - mahmud 16y ago
        Like what? Junk with referral IDs?
  - fletchowns 16y ago
    I don't know about the rest of you but there are plenty of links in my bookmarks that are probably more than 10 years old that are still active.
    - Semiapies 16y ago
      And many, many, many more links you've clicked on in the last ten years that lead to 404s right now.
jpablo 16y ago
Why do we need url shorteners again ? When I see a shortened URL the probabilities of me clicking the link go down to almost zero.
- stevefink 16y ago
  We don't need them. Companies that create the shorteners need them to collect information about who clicks on your links. That, and there's a service out there that limits updates to 140 characters.
  - statictype 16y ago
    Even before twitter, url shorteners were useful in many places. For example, a Google Maps link would be a good candidate for url shortening. When used in emails/usenet/IM windows, long urls often get mangled.
  - blantonl 16y ago
    We do need them. While twitter pretty much spawned the whole ecosystem, there still is a very important and functional use for URL shorteners. The biggest, outside of twitter, has to be the method of emailing enormous html links to someone. With so many email clients out there, it is a crap shoot to send a link. Personally and professionally bit.ly has really helped out in those cases. With that in mind, I wonder what impact this announcement has on bit.ly and the other players. Does google provide analytics on their shortened links? What is the value be between the different shorteners now that Google has an offering.
    - shrikant 16y ago
      Click on the link up top, and staring at you in the face we have this text: All goo.gl URLs and click analytics are public and can be shared by anyone.
    - mfukar 16y ago
      The biggest, outside of twitter, has to be the method of emailing enormous html links to someone. Last I tried, I could send an email formatted in HTML, where: <a href="http://my.crazy.long.url.gz">See this</a> didn't take that much space, and could be read by any half-decent email client. Even alpine can do it.
msg 16y ago
There are a couple of Greasemonkeys to lengthen shortened URLs. Hopefully they will be updated soon. http://userscripts.org/scripts/search?q=expand+URL+shortener&x=0&y=0 http://userscripts.org/scripts/search?q=expand+URL+shortener...
- nir 16y ago
  I made a simple URL lengthening JSON/P web service: http://therealurl.appspot.com/ http://therealurl.appspot.com/ - will be happy to help any devs working on these scripts.
zacharycohn 16y ago
[edit - Nevermind, solved below in the comments.] Does anyone know how these work long-term? This one shortens a URL to 4 characters, so for a potentially major URL shortener, there is a relatively low number of possible outputs. Once they hit their limit, do they start erasing the oldest ones? The most inactive ones? For shorteners that give consistent shortened URLs (i.e. everytime you shorten the same input URL, you get the same shortened output URL), how do they deal with hitting their maximum?
- JeremyBanks 16y ago
  Once the 4-character paths are saturated they'll probably simply move to 5-characters. With respect to goo.gl, the help page lists these features: Immutable - once created by you, no one else can change them Irrevocable - once created, they do not expire. I think that most large shorteners don't automatically expire links. It would be pretty miserable if they did.
  - zacharycohn 16y ago
    Yeah, I just ran the math. (numbers + lowercase + upper case)^num of characters 10+26+26 = 62^4 = 14,776,336. That's a reasonably large number (and then my friend just suggested the adding a character if they start to run out). Thanks!
- acangiano 16y ago
  > Once they hit their limit, do they start erasing the oldest ones? The most inactive ones? Let's do the math. If we assume that a service only uses a-z, A-Z and 0-9 as characters for the shortened URL, we have a set of 62 characters. /x -> 62 /xx -> 62^2 = 3,844 /xxx -> 62^3 = 238,328 /xxxx -> 62^4 = 14,776,336 /xxxxx -> 62^5 = 916,132,832 /xxxxxx -> 62^6 = 56,800,235,584 In the worst case scenario, the URL shortener will have to use a 6 character identifier at some point, giving them a complessive coverage of almost 58 billion URLs. The 4 characters they are currently using will only be enough for a while. They'll switch to 5 soon enough.
  - jodrellblank 16y ago
inmygarage 16y ago
url shorteners are so 2009.
adam-_- 16y ago
Could they not have bought http://g.gl http://g.gl?
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  No, we couldn't. Unfortunately, Greenland doesn't sell X.gl or XX.gl domains. So goo.gl was the shortest we could get.
  - werftgh 16y ago
    Greenland's GDP is <$1Bn and Google is worth $50bn couldn't you have just bought them? You could turn the entire country into a passively cooled data center!
    - tonfa 16y ago
      I thought Greenland had some kind of relationship with Denmark.
      - werftgh 16y ago
        I think they are now "seeing other people" after Denmark made some comment about expanding glaciers that Greenland took personally !
albertzeyer 16y ago
goo.gl has been around for quite a while. Is there something new I don't see here? Edit: Ah, its website is just new. Here the original post: http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-url-shortener-gets-website.html http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-url-short... There was already a Chrome extension since the beginning.
- netaddict 16y ago
  Earlier they did not offer custom URL shortening. goo.gl was used by Google services like Reader, YouTube but it was not open to public.
  - albertzeyer 16y ago
    Hm but with that Chrome extension, it worked. So I guess there was an open API already.
    - JeremyBanks 16y ago
      The Chrome extension reverse-engineered the API from the Google toolbar, it wasn't officially released.
yanw 16y ago
An obvious next step would be integrating Google Analytics.
ez77 16y ago
Official announcement: http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-url-shortener-gets-website.html http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-url-short... ... or simply http://goo.gl/5av9 http://goo.gl/5av9 =)
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
- jodrellblank 16y ago
  Everyone who upvoted it. If the upvote links were run through goo.gl the public statistics could tell you.
dsspence 16y ago
Entering goo.gl should return itself don't you think?
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  There's a little Easter egg where goo.gl/e will go to Google. :)
werftgh 16y ago
Just out of interest - do the top level DNSs look at the entire address or is Greenland's main internet supplier going to melt under the load of redirecting everything to Google?
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  My guess is that Greenland can handle the load just fine. :)
  - werftgh 16y ago
    The country has a population of 50,000 I don't know how good their connectivity is but I'm guessing Google has quite a few more users than that. Hopefully the ISP's DNS caches goo.gl and doesn't just send it all to root .gl to handle!
faramarz 16y ago
Now can we get a bookmarket? anyone?
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  faramarz, bookmarklets like http://www.labnol.org/internet/googl-bookmarklet/11871/ http://www.labnol.org/internet/googl-bookmarklet/11871/ should work just fine. To get history/analytics, just login to goo.gl and you're good to go. Instead of a bookmarklet, I prefer to use this Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/iblijlcdoidgdpfknkckljiocdbnlagk https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/iblijlcdoidgdpfk...
  - faramarz 16y ago
    Thanks Matt :)
bretthellman 16y ago
What happened to Google innovating? At least they included a QR Code...
walkon 16y ago
Is it just me, or was I able to "shorten" an already goo.gl shortened url? http://goo.gl/fBUb http://goo.gl/fBUb --> http://goo.gl/Bkmv http://goo.gl/Bkmv --> http://news.ycombinator.com http://news.ycombinator.com They don't want to allow this, do they?
- mjallday 16y ago
  They do if they want to be able to track clicks on your copy of that URL distinctly from my copy of that URL.
- brown9-2 16y ago
  I had no problem creating links about five layers deep: http://goo.gl/87bM http://goo.gl/87bM --> http://goo.gl/4P9R http://goo.gl/4P9R http://goo.gl/4P9R http://goo.gl/4P9R --> http://goo.gl/7W5A http://goo.gl/7W5A http://goo.gl/7W5A http://goo.gl/7W5A --> http://goo.gl/Wcsa http://goo.gl/Wcsa http://goo.gl/Wcsa http://goo.gl/Wcsa --> http://goo.gl/qzcb http://goo.gl/qzcb http://goo.gl/qzcb http://goo.gl/qzcb --> http://goo.gl/ http://goo.gl/
  - simonsarris 16y ago
    Amusingly, I clicked the first link which took me to goo.gl, and closed the window to see every one of your links turn 'visited', giving me instant confirmation that I did indeed visit each (in spite of there being nothing in the back-history)
raphar 16y ago
Mystery links! check this two: http://goo.gl/MTtd http://goo.gl/MTtd http://goo.gl/jDpb http://goo.gl/jDpb
eiji 16y ago
404: Page not found JS required! A new google-low and a big disappointment.
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  I think we can do a push for that. Check back in a day or so.
empika 16y ago
Its obvious that we need shorteners, the original purpose being email but Twitter bucked that trend. So now, what we dont need is more URL shorteners. What we do need is more sites to implement their own shortening like YouTube and Flickr (eg, http://youtu.be/3jDfSqtG2E4 http://youtu.be/3jDfSqtG2E4 and http://flic.kr/p/MGuRJ http://flic.kr/p/MGuRJ). Its all about the rev canonical. This way, a shortened URL will stay about as long as that site is about and the internets doesn't break. People seem to want click stats though, although i dont see why you cant get these out of google analytics etc. Check out http://revcanonical.appspot.com/ http://revcanonical.appspot.com/ for more.
billmcneale 16y ago
Can we have a bookmarklet or a sidebar, like bit.ly?
c00p3r 16y ago
What hashing function they use?
- mahmud 16y ago
  Base62. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1119722/base-62-conversion-in-python http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1119722/base-62-conversio... A case-insensitive variant is Base36: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_36 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_36 I remember you being a Lisp programmer; it's built into CL's Format function: (format t "~36r" 9999) ==> 7PR
  - c00p3r 16y ago
    Thank you!
srw 16y ago
Will URL shorteners kill the Internet?
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
tectonic 16y ago
Since these are almost incremental, it's easy to guess existing links. There must be both good and bad uses for this...
Tichy 16y ago
In all the excitement, we forgot to ask about the API. I am curious what they will provide, and with what limits. One big problem I had with bit.ly on Twitter is there was no way to get all shortened URLs pointing to a "real" URL. This was a problem because I wanted to search for references to the "real" URL. The lack of that feature of course empowered dedicated services like backtype (I suppose), who have special deals with Twitter so that they can get all references.

153 points by stevefink 16y ago

I know there's a plethora of URL shorteners these days, and most platform providers (eg: Twitter) are introducing their own so they can harvest analytics themselves. For whatever reason though, I keep trusting Google with all of my most personal information. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, but I have a feeling this will become my standard URL shortener just as Google Apps has become my standard for email, invoicing customers, document management and scheduling. Not to mention Google Reader for having information on all the RSS feeds I visit and Google's search knowing what links I am visiting daily, and probably thirty other products I'm using that stores my information on their servers.

jakerocheleau 16y ago
yeah same here it seems like my entire life is run through Google these days. I just assume they have so much data there's no way they could possibly care about what I'm doing. I could be very wrong, though.
brown9-2 16y ago
This is a tangent but: how do you invoice customers with Google Apps?
- stevefink 16y ago
  I actually started my invoicing life with Zoho Invoice. They have since become available on Google Apps, which is super convenient for me, as a Google Apps user: http://www.zoho.com/invoice/zohoinvoice-for-googleapps.html http://www.zoho.com/invoice/zohoinvoice-for-googleapps.html
- fragmede 16y ago
  I'm guessing either Google Docs, or the Apps marketplace (http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/ http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/).

andymoe 16y ago

Nice simple public stats: http://goo.gl/info/Jvhu#two_hours http://goo.gl/info/Jvhu#two_hours Not a huge fan of the flash chart though. http://goo.gl/Jvhu http://goo.gl/Jvhu http://goo.gl/Jvhu.qr http://goo.gl/Jvhu.qr EDIT: Better graph

redorb 16y ago
the chart looks to be a hang-over from google.com/finance; I like the interactivity of it... I'm sure they will replace it with a html5/canvas solution as soon as they feel the adoption is worth it (for those alternatives)
nikhilgk 16y ago
That first link just gave us some analytics about the people here on HN. Offtopic: It reported Chrome on Ubuntu as Browsers: Ubuntu
- andymoe 16y ago
  Yeah, I thought the browser stats for HN people was interesting as well. We love Chrome and apparently one person likes news.ycombinator.org.
raphar 16y ago
Strange... : I clicked in the above url. Then I copied the resulting url (http://www.magicbeef.com/ http://www.magicbeef.com/) After pasting it in google service, it produced a different short url: http://goo.gl/YH1c http://goo.gl/YH1c I first assumed that every destination would render an unique short url, but thats not the case. This way google knows the full stats of http://www.magicbeef.com/ http://www.magicbeef.com/. But you can only know the real stats if you know ALL the short urls pointing to it. :) EDIT: I my short url stats page theres a notice: "119 total clicks on all goo.gl short URLs pointing to this long URL" EDIT: Notice the browser stats of the link (http://goo.gl/info/Jvhu http://goo.gl/info/Jvhu) Almost NO IE. Also less than a half windows.
- netaddict 16y ago

cosgroveb 16y ago

Interesting that all click analytics are public...

jonknee 16y ago
Same for Bit.ly...

jnoller 16y ago

Ugh. Google entering this pretty much wipes out the space - companies like bit.ly are going to need to work on seriously differentiating themselves from the pack, and even then I don't think they're long for the world. I can honestly say I hope to never be in a market - or working on a product - where google suddenly decides to enter the game. Even if their offering sucks, or is broken, it sucks all the air out of the room because it's OMG Google.

Lewisham 16y ago
I don't think anyone really believed that something you can hack together in twenty minutes, where your business plan is completely based on "for as long as Twitter doesn't do one", really counts as a "space". Anyone who invested in it deserved to get burned. bit.ly were working on partnerships with publishers as their means of getting some monetization, but that's all I've really seen. I'd prefer the Google one to the others, because at least I have some guarantee that the Google one won't go away.
- cadr 16y ago
  Like Wave didn't go away?
  - iheartmemcache 16y ago
    To be fair, Wave is still functional and Google announced intentions of releasing "Wave in a Box" (1). And they have explicitly said they'll provide a method to export existing data. Either way, their decommissioning of Wave is a lot more responsible than, say, what Xmarks is doing. I trust Google a lot more than a fly-by-night startup to gracefully shutdown their services. (1) http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-source-next-steps-wave-in-box.html http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-source-n...
- trezor 16y ago
  where your business plan is completely based on "for as long as Twitter doesn't do one" From what I could tell from the last emails sent from twitter, they are doing one. I wrote a very short blog-post on that since I was surprised nobody else seemed to notice: http://jostein.kjonigsen.net/articles/166/Twitter_finally_kills_URL_shortening__almost_.aspx http://jostein.kjonigsen.net/articles/166/Twitter_finally_ki...

fletchowns 16y ago

I wonder what the web will be like in 10 years when most of these URL shorteners don't exist anymore and we're just left with a web full of links that go nowhere. I'm sure the Google one will survive, seems like we shouldn't have to use these URL shorteners at all though.

jberryman 16y ago
i agree with you, but how many of those unshortened links do you think will exist 10 years from now? i think the web is like a brain in which memory is active, not static. it`s just a bit too young for that to be obvious.
- drv 16y ago
  At least the unshortened links have a chance of being scraped by things like archive.org; I wonder if it scrapes anything meaningful from the popular URL shorteners.
  - bigfudge 16y ago
    Actually, scraping only links from shorteners would be a a good strategy form preserving what is worth preserving.
    - mahmud 16y ago
      Like what? Junk with referral IDs?
- fletchowns 16y ago
  I don't know about the rest of you but there are plenty of links in my bookmarks that are probably more than 10 years old that are still active.
  - Semiapies 16y ago
    And many, many, many more links you've clicked on in the last ten years that lead to 404s right now.

jpablo 16y ago

Why do we need url shorteners again ? When I see a shortened URL the probabilities of me clicking the link go down to almost zero.

stevefink 16y ago
We don't need them. Companies that create the shorteners need them to collect information about who clicks on your links. That, and there's a service out there that limits updates to 140 characters.
- statictype 16y ago
  Even before twitter, url shorteners were useful in many places. For example, a Google Maps link would be a good candidate for url shortening. When used in emails/usenet/IM windows, long urls often get mangled.
- blantonl 16y ago
  We do need them. While twitter pretty much spawned the whole ecosystem, there still is a very important and functional use for URL shorteners. The biggest, outside of twitter, has to be the method of emailing enormous html links to someone. With so many email clients out there, it is a crap shoot to send a link. Personally and professionally bit.ly has really helped out in those cases. With that in mind, I wonder what impact this announcement has on bit.ly and the other players. Does google provide analytics on their shortened links? What is the value be between the different shorteners now that Google has an offering.
  - shrikant 16y ago
    Click on the link up top, and staring at you in the face we have this text: All goo.gl URLs and click analytics are public and can be shared by anyone.
  - mfukar 16y ago
    The biggest, outside of twitter, has to be the method of emailing enormous html links to someone. Last I tried, I could send an email formatted in HTML, where: <a href="http://my.crazy.long.url.gz">See this</a> didn't take that much space, and could be read by any half-decent email client. Even alpine can do it.

msg 16y ago

There are a couple of Greasemonkeys to lengthen shortened URLs. Hopefully they will be updated soon. http://userscripts.org/scripts/search?q=expand+URL+shortener&x=0&y=0 http://userscripts.org/scripts/search?q=expand+URL+shortener...

nir 16y ago
I made a simple URL lengthening JSON/P web service: http://therealurl.appspot.com/ http://therealurl.appspot.com/ - will be happy to help any devs working on these scripts.

zacharycohn 16y ago

[edit - Nevermind, solved below in the comments.] Does anyone know how these work long-term? This one shortens a URL to 4 characters, so for a potentially major URL shortener, there is a relatively low number of possible outputs. Once they hit their limit, do they start erasing the oldest ones? The most inactive ones? For shorteners that give consistent shortened URLs (i.e. everytime you shorten the same input URL, you get the same shortened output URL), how do they deal with hitting their maximum?

JeremyBanks 16y ago
Once the 4-character paths are saturated they'll probably simply move to 5-characters. With respect to goo.gl, the help page lists these features: Immutable - once created by you, no one else can change them Irrevocable - once created, they do not expire. I think that most large shorteners don't automatically expire links. It would be pretty miserable if they did.
- zacharycohn 16y ago
  Yeah, I just ran the math. (numbers + lowercase + upper case)^num of characters 10+26+26 = 62^4 = 14,776,336. That's a reasonably large number (and then my friend just suggested the adding a character if they start to run out). Thanks!
acangiano 16y ago
> Once they hit their limit, do they start erasing the oldest ones? The most inactive ones? Let's do the math. If we assume that a service only uses a-z, A-Z and 0-9 as characters for the shortened URL, we have a set of 62 characters. /x -> 62 /xx -> 62^2 = 3,844 /xxx -> 62^3 = 238,328 /xxxx -> 62^4 = 14,776,336 /xxxxx -> 62^5 = 916,132,832 /xxxxxx -> 62^6 = 56,800,235,584 In the worst case scenario, the URL shortener will have to use a 6 character identifier at some point, giving them a complessive coverage of almost 58 billion URLs. The 4 characters they are currently using will only be enough for a while. They'll switch to 5 soon enough.
- jodrellblank 16y ago

inmygarage 16y ago

url shorteners are so 2009.

adam-_- 16y ago

Could they not have bought http://g.gl http://g.gl?

Matt_Cutts 16y ago
No, we couldn't. Unfortunately, Greenland doesn't sell X.gl or XX.gl domains. So goo.gl was the shortest we could get.
- werftgh 16y ago
  Greenland's GDP is <$1Bn and Google is worth $50bn couldn't you have just bought them? You could turn the entire country into a passively cooled data center!
  - tonfa 16y ago
    I thought Greenland had some kind of relationship with Denmark.
    - werftgh 16y ago
      I think they are now "seeing other people" after Denmark made some comment about expanding glaciers that Greenland took personally !

albertzeyer 16y ago

goo.gl has been around for quite a while. Is there something new I don't see here? Edit: Ah, its website is just new. Here the original post: http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-url-shortener-gets-website.html http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-url-short... There was already a Chrome extension since the beginning.

netaddict 16y ago
Earlier they did not offer custom URL shortening. goo.gl was used by Google services like Reader, YouTube but it was not open to public.
- albertzeyer 16y ago
  Hm but with that Chrome extension, it worked. So I guess there was an open API already.
  - JeremyBanks 16y ago
    The Chrome extension reverse-engineered the API from the Google toolbar, it wasn't officially released.

yanw 16y ago

An obvious next step would be integrating Google Analytics.

ez77 16y ago

Official announcement: http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-url-shortener-gets-website.html http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-url-short... ... or simply http://goo.gl/5av9 http://goo.gl/5av9 =)

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

jodrellblank 16y ago
Everyone who upvoted it. If the upvote links were run through goo.gl the public statistics could tell you.

dsspence 16y ago

Entering goo.gl should return itself don't you think?

Matt_Cutts 16y ago
There's a little Easter egg where goo.gl/e will go to Google. :)

werftgh 16y ago

Just out of interest - do the top level DNSs look at the entire address or is Greenland's main internet supplier going to melt under the load of redirecting everything to Google?

Matt_Cutts 16y ago
My guess is that Greenland can handle the load just fine. :)
- werftgh 16y ago
  The country has a population of 50,000 I don't know how good their connectivity is but I'm guessing Google has quite a few more users than that. Hopefully the ISP's DNS caches goo.gl and doesn't just send it all to root .gl to handle!

faramarz 16y ago

Now can we get a bookmarket? anyone?

Matt_Cutts 16y ago
faramarz, bookmarklets like http://www.labnol.org/internet/googl-bookmarklet/11871/ http://www.labnol.org/internet/googl-bookmarklet/11871/ should work just fine. To get history/analytics, just login to goo.gl and you're good to go. Instead of a bookmarklet, I prefer to use this Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/iblijlcdoidgdpfknkckljiocdbnlagk https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/iblijlcdoidgdpfk...
- faramarz 16y ago
  Thanks Matt :)

bretthellman 16y ago

What happened to Google innovating? At least they included a QR Code...

walkon 16y ago

Is it just me, or was I able to "shorten" an already goo.gl shortened url? http://goo.gl/fBUb http://goo.gl/fBUb --> http://goo.gl/Bkmv http://goo.gl/Bkmv --> http://news.ycombinator.com http://news.ycombinator.com They don't want to allow this, do they?

mjallday 16y ago
They do if they want to be able to track clicks on your copy of that URL distinctly from my copy of that URL.
brown9-2 16y ago
I had no problem creating links about five layers deep: http://goo.gl/87bM http://goo.gl/87bM --> http://goo.gl/4P9R http://goo.gl/4P9R http://goo.gl/4P9R http://goo.gl/4P9R --> http://goo.gl/7W5A http://goo.gl/7W5A http://goo.gl/7W5A http://goo.gl/7W5A --> http://goo.gl/Wcsa http://goo.gl/Wcsa http://goo.gl/Wcsa http://goo.gl/Wcsa --> http://goo.gl/qzcb http://goo.gl/qzcb http://goo.gl/qzcb http://goo.gl/qzcb --> http://goo.gl/ http://goo.gl/
- simonsarris 16y ago
  Amusingly, I clicked the first link which took me to goo.gl, and closed the window to see every one of your links turn 'visited', giving me instant confirmation that I did indeed visit each (in spite of there being nothing in the back-history)

raphar 16y ago

Mystery links! check this two: http://goo.gl/MTtd http://goo.gl/MTtd http://goo.gl/jDpb http://goo.gl/jDpb

eiji 16y ago

404: Page not found JS required! A new google-low and a big disappointment.

Matt_Cutts 16y ago
I think we can do a push for that. Check back in a day or so.

empika 16y ago

Its obvious that we need shorteners, the original purpose being email but Twitter bucked that trend. So now, what we dont need is more URL shorteners. What we do need is more sites to implement their own shortening like YouTube and Flickr (eg, http://youtu.be/3jDfSqtG2E4 http://youtu.be/3jDfSqtG2E4 and http://flic.kr/p/MGuRJ http://flic.kr/p/MGuRJ). Its all about the rev canonical. This way, a shortened URL will stay about as long as that site is about and the internets doesn't break. People seem to want click stats though, although i dont see why you cant get these out of google analytics etc. Check out http://revcanonical.appspot.com/ http://revcanonical.appspot.com/ for more.

billmcneale 16y ago

Can we have a bookmarklet or a sidebar, like bit.ly?

c00p3r 16y ago

What hashing function they use?

mahmud 16y ago
Base62. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1119722/base-62-conversion-in-python http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1119722/base-62-conversio... A case-insensitive variant is Base36: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_36 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_36 I remember you being a Lisp programmer; it's built into CL's Format function: (format t "~36r" 9999) ==> 7PR
- c00p3r 16y ago
  Thank you!

srw 16y ago

Will URL shorteners kill the Internet?

deleted 16y ago

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tectonic 16y ago

Since these are almost incremental, it's easy to guess existing links. There must be both good and bad uses for this...

Tichy 16y ago

In all the excitement, we forgot to ask about the API. I am curious what they will provide, and with what limits. One big problem I had with bit.ly on Twitter is there was no way to get all shortened URLs pointing to a "real" URL. This was a problem because I wanted to search for references to the "real" URL. The lack of that feature of course empowered dedicated services like backtype (I suppose), who have special deals with Twitter so that they can get all references.