5 ms·

Yes, and everybody dies one day. But you don't need to double the problem by making a link rely on two domains and shortening its life. What's more, if you ha

by jraph 5y ago

Yes, and everybody dies one day. But you don't need to double the problem by making a link rely on two domains and shortening its life. What's more, if you have the complete original URL, you might be able to use an archive service that might have taken a snapshot, or at least try to guess what was behind the link by looking at it. Shortened URLs are usually inscrutable.

tobr 5y ago
> shortening its life. Oh, is that why it’s called a URL shortener!
egeozcan 5y ago
> What's more, if you have the complete original URL, you might be able to use an archive service that might have taken a snapshot, or at least try to guess what was behind the link by looking at it This is the most important part. Now some smart crawlers figured it out and show you the archived version of the redirect if you got lucky, but so much has been lost because more or less everyone found it aesthetically unpleasing to look at long links. I suppose we weren't aware of the trade-off.
- mgdlbp 5y ago
  Both the Wayback Machine and archive.today handle redirects by recording the redirect under the redirecting URL and recording the actual snapshot under the final URL (neither perfectly, though—see below).[0][1] And a short URL that occurs many times in the web will be picked up by crawls in the same way as other URLs. Thus, the effect of short URLs on archiving isn't entirely disastrous. Still, the cost is paid in the long tail of short URLs that will never be archived. Both archive services have shortcomings of their own related to URL shortening: - archive.is ironically encourages the use of shortened URLs to its own archived snapshots![0] Its long URLs, which I've never seen used in the wild, are for some reason hidden away in the 'share' menu. - archive.is stores the original submitted URL in the final snapshot and shows it in the header if is not the same as the ultimately archived URL,[0] but WBM does not.[1] - WBM mysteriously doesn't work on bit.ly (returning only the message 'Job failed.'[2]), but does work on tinyurl.com. Unfortunately, opaque errors like this are not uncommon with the WBM, errors sometimes as serious as snapshots becoming completely blank years after being taken! Somewhat concerning considering its role as an archive, I'd say. If only the Internet Archive had open-sourced their server like Wikimedia did from the start… [0] example: https://archive.today/KWDbr https://archive.today/KWDbr [1] example: https://web.archive.org/web/0/tinyurl.com/3k8mma8k https://web.archive.org/web/0/tinyurl.com/3k8mma8k [2] For example, try http://web.archive.org/save/https://bit.ly/3vO29UB http://web.archive.org/save/https://bit.ly/3vO29UB Aside: It's a bit interesting, considering both current events and archive.is's notoriously unclear ownership (the only common info being the domain's registration to an individual in Prague) that two of the five social media sites in the 'share' menu are VK and LiveJournal. Are those commonly used outside of Russia in recent years?
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
there's no reason an url shortener couldn't be an archiving service as well, other than of course where's the money for that coming from. on edit: this of course does not answer the inscrutability of the url, only the archiving complaint.
- jraph 5y ago
  > only the archiving complaint. Only partially: to other archiving services, a shortened URL from this shortener which also happens to be an archiving service is the same thing as if the shortener didn't provide archival. The only solution I see is that archive services resolve these shortened URLs when they archive a page and archive the result with it. The second best and probably more reasonable solution is that they maintain a directory (mapping) of shortened URLs to real URLs assuming the mapping does not change. But one can see it's rapidly a mess right?
- mgdlbp 5y ago
  Like https://archive.ph/ivKNO https://archive.ph/ivKNO ? I've actually never seen a long link from archive.today in the wild: http://archive.is/2022.04.26-061642/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31162829 http://archive.is/2022.04.26-061642/https://news.ycombinator... (For the unaware, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and archive.today (they've got many TLDs) are well established as the two major general-purpose web archives.)

by jraph 5y ago

tobr 5y ago

> shortening its life. Oh, is that why it’s called a URL shortener!

egeozcan 5y ago

> What's more, if you have the complete original URL, you might be able to use an archive service that might have taken a snapshot, or at least try to guess what was behind the link by looking at it This is the most important part. Now some smart crawlers figured it out and show you the archived version of the redirect if you got lucky, but so much has been lost because more or less everyone found it aesthetically unpleasing to look at long links. I suppose we weren't aware of the trade-off.

mgdlbp 5y ago
Both the Wayback Machine and archive.today handle redirects by recording the redirect under the redirecting URL and recording the actual snapshot under the final URL (neither perfectly, though—see below).[0][1] And a short URL that occurs many times in the web will be picked up by crawls in the same way as other URLs. Thus, the effect of short URLs on archiving isn't entirely disastrous. Still, the cost is paid in the long tail of short URLs that will never be archived. Both archive services have shortcomings of their own related to URL shortening: - archive.is ironically encourages the use of shortened URLs to its own archived snapshots![0] Its long URLs, which I've never seen used in the wild, are for some reason hidden away in the 'share' menu. - archive.is stores the original submitted URL in the final snapshot and shows it in the header if is not the same as the ultimately archived URL,[0] but WBM does not.[1] - WBM mysteriously doesn't work on bit.ly (returning only the message 'Job failed.'[2]), but does work on tinyurl.com. Unfortunately, opaque errors like this are not uncommon with the WBM, errors sometimes as serious as snapshots becoming completely blank years after being taken! Somewhat concerning considering its role as an archive, I'd say. If only the Internet Archive had open-sourced their server like Wikimedia did from the start… [0] example: https://archive.today/KWDbr https://archive.today/KWDbr [1] example: https://web.archive.org/web/0/tinyurl.com/3k8mma8k https://web.archive.org/web/0/tinyurl.com/3k8mma8k [2] For example, try http://web.archive.org/save/https://bit.ly/3vO29UB http://web.archive.org/save/https://bit.ly/3vO29UB Aside: It's a bit interesting, considering both current events and archive.is's notoriously unclear ownership (the only common info being the domain's registration to an individual in Prague) that two of the five social media sites in the 'share' menu are VK and LiveJournal. Are those commonly used outside of Russia in recent years?

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

there's no reason an url shortener couldn't be an archiving service as well, other than of course where's the money for that coming from. on edit: this of course does not answer the inscrutability of the url, only the archiving complaint.

jraph 5y ago
> only the archiving complaint. Only partially: to other archiving services, a shortened URL from this shortener which also happens to be an archiving service is the same thing as if the shortener didn't provide archival. The only solution I see is that archive services resolve these shortened URLs when they archive a page and archive the result with it. The second best and probably more reasonable solution is that they maintain a directory (mapping) of shortened URLs to real URLs assuming the mapping does not change. But one can see it's rapidly a mess right?
mgdlbp 5y ago
Like https://archive.ph/ivKNO https://archive.ph/ivKNO ? I've actually never seen a long link from archive.today in the wild: http://archive.is/2022.04.26-061642/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31162829 http://archive.is/2022.04.26-061642/https://news.ycombinator... (For the unaware, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and archive.today (they've got many TLDs) are well established as the two major general-purpose web archives.)