I'm a bit late to the party here, and the following doesn't address a lot of the concerns in the article (nor does it actually get rid of URLs), but for anyone

I'm a bit late to the party here, and the following doesn't address a lot of the concerns in the article (nor does it actually get rid of URLs), but for anyone interested in alternatives to horribly long URLs or incredibly opaque URL shorteners I made a fun little tool [0]. It's called ShortestSearch and in essence could be looked at as a reverse Google in that you give Google search terms and it gives you a list of websites, but for ShortestSearch you give it a website and it gives you a list of search terms. All with the aim to perfect the art of "It should be the first result if you Google 'x y z' ". Also found the part of the article where it describes its own URL strangely enjoyable. [0] https://oisinmoran.com/ShortestSearch/ https://oisinmoran.com/ShortestSearch/