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Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month
- throwaway81523 1y agoCartoon villains. That's what they are.
- edent 1y agoAbout 60k academic citations about to die - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=90&q=%22https://goo.gl/%22&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=90&q=%22https://goo... Countless books with irrevocably broken references - https://www.google.com/search?q=%22://goo.gl%22&sca_upv=1&sca_upv=1&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:2010,cd_max:2024,bkt:b&tbm=bks https://www.google.com/search?q=%22://goo.gl%22&sca_upv=1&sc... And for what? The cost of keeping a few TB online and a little bit of CPU power? An absolute act of cultural vandalism.
- eviks 1y ago> And for what? The cost of keeping a few TB online and a little bit of CPU power? For the immeasurable benefits of educating the public.
- djfivyvusn 1y agoThe vandalism was relying on Google.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoYou'd think people would learn. Ah, well. Hopefully we can do better from lessons learned.
- api 1y agoThe web is a crap architecture for permanent references anyway. A link points to a server, not e.g. a content hash. The simplicity of the web is one of its virtues but also leaves a lot on the table.
- toomuchtodo 1y agohttps://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Goo.gl https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Goo.gl https://tracker.archiveteam.org/goo-gl/ https://tracker.archiveteam.org/goo-gl/ (1.66B work items remaining as of this comment) How to run an ArchiveTeam warrior: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior (edit: i see jaydenmilne commented about this further down thread, mea culpa)
- pentagrama 1y agoThank you for that information! I wanted to help and did that using VMware. For curious people, here is what the UI looks like, you have a list of projects to choose, I choose the goo.gl project, and a "Current project" tab which shows the project activity. Project list: https://imgur.com/a/peTVzyw https://imgur.com/a/peTVzyw Current project: https://imgur.com/a/QVuWWIj https://imgur.com/a/QVuWWIj
- addandsubtract 1y agoAlso available as a docker file, for those not running VMs: https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/warrior-dockerfile https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/warrior-dockerfile
- progbits 1y agoThey appear to be doing ~37k items per minute, with 1.6B remaining that is roughly 30 days left. So that's just barely enough to do it in time. Going to run the warrior over the weekend to help out a bit.
- raybb 1y ago7 days later and they're down to 1.2B remaining!
- xingped 1y agoFor those in the now, is this heavy on disk usage? Should I install this on my disk drive or my SSD? Just want to avoid tons of disk writes on an SSD if it's unnecessary.
- epolanski 1y agoJm2c, but if your resource is a link to an online resource that's borderline already (at any point the content can be changed or disappear). Even worse if your resource is a shortened link by some other service, you've just added yet another layer of unreliable indirection.
- whatevaa 1y agoCitations are citations, if it's a link, you link to it. But using shorteners for that is silly.
- bugsMarathon88 1y ago[flagged]
- edent 1y agoGosh! It is a pity Google doesn't hire any smart people who know how to build a throttling system. Still, they're a tiny and cash-starved company so we can't expect too much of them.
- lyu07282 1y agoIts almost like as if once a company becomes this big, burning them to the ground would be better for society or something. That would be the liberal position on monopolies if they actually believed in anything.
- bugsMarathon88 1y agoIt is a business, not a charity. Adjust your expectations accordingly, or expect disappointment.
- acheron 1y agoMust not be any questions about that in Leetcode.
- quesera 1y agoModern webservers are very, very fast on modern CPUs. I hear Google has some CPU infrastructure? I don't know if GCP has a free tier like AWS does, but 10kQPS is likely within the capability of a free EC2 instance running nginx with a static redirect map. Maybe splurge for the one with a full GB of RAM? No problem.
- b112 1y agoYou could deprecate the service, and archive the links as static html. 200bytes of text for an html redirect (not js). You can serve immense volumes of traffic from static html. One hardware server alone could so easily do the job. Your attack surface is also tiny without a back end interpreter. People will chime in with redundancy, but the point is Google could stop maintaining the ingress, and still not be douches about existing urls. But... you know, it's Google.
- zffr 1y agoFor people wanting to include URL references in things like books, what’s the right approach to take today? I’m genuinely asking. It seems like its hard to trust that any service will remaining running for decades
- toomuchtodo 1y agohttps://perma.cc/ https://perma.cc/ It is built for the task, and assuming worse case scenario of sunset, it would be ingested into the Wayback Machine. Note that both the Internet Archive and Cloudflare are supporting partners (bottom of page). (https://doi.org/ https://doi.org/ is also an option, but not as accessible to a casual user; the DOI Foundation pointed me to https://www.crossref.org/ https://www.crossref.org/ for adhoc DOI registration, although I have not had time to research further)
- Hyperlisk 1y agoperma.cc is great. Also check out their tools if you want to get your hands dirty with your own archival process: https://tools.perma.cc/ https://tools.perma.cc/
- ruined 1y agoperma.cc is an interesting project, thanks for sharing. other readers may be specifically interested in their contingency plan https://perma.cc/contingency-plan https://perma.cc/contingency-plan
- whoahwio 1y agoWhile Perma is solution specifically for this problem, and a good one at that - citing the might of the backing company is a bit ironic here
- toomuchtodo 1y agoIf Cloudflare provides the infra (thanks Cloudflare!), I am happy to have them provide the compute and network for the lookups (which, at their scale, is probably a rounding error), with the Internet Archive remaining the storage system of last resort. Is that different than the Internet Archive offering compute to provide the lookups on top of their storage system? Everything is temporary, intent is important, etc. Can always revisit the stack as long as the data exists on disk somewhere accessible. This is distinct from Google saying "bye y'all, no more GETs for you" with no other way to access the data.
- kazinator 1y agoThe act of vandalism occurs when someone creates a shortened URL, not when they stop working.
- oyveybro 1y ago[flagged]
- jeffbee 1y agoWhile an interesting attempt at an impact statement, 90% of the results on the first two pages for me are not references to goo.gl shorteners, but are instead OCR errors or just gibberish. One of the papers is from 1981.
- nikanj 1y agoThe cost of dealing and supporting an old codebase instead of burning it all and releasing a written-from-scratch replacement next year
- crossroadsguy 1y agoI have always struggled with this. If I buy a book I don’t want an online/URL reference in it. Put the book/author/isbn/page etc. Or refer to the magazine/newspaper/journal/issue/page/author/etc.
- BobaFloutist 1y agoI mean preferably do both, right? The URL is better for however long it works.
- SoftTalker 1y agoWe are long, long past any notion that URLs are permanent references to anything. Better to cite with title, author, and publisher so that maybe a web search will turn it up later. The original URL will almost certainly be broken after a few years.
- SirMaster 1y agoCan't someone just go through programmatically right now and build a list of all these links and where they point to? And then put up a list somewhere that everyone can go look up if they need to?
- spixy 1y agoYes: https://tracker.archiveteam.org/goo-gl https://tracker.archiveteam.org/goo-gl
- garyHL 1y ago[dead]
- jlarocco 1y agoIMO it's less Google's fault and more a crappy tech education problem. It wasn't a good idea to use shortened links in a citation in the first place, and somebody should have explained that to the authors. They didn't publish a book or write an academic paper in a vacuum - somebody around them should have known better and said something. And really it's not much different than anything else online - it can disappear on a whim. How many of those shortened links even go to valid pages any more? And no company is going to maintain a "free" service forever. It's easy to say, "It's only ...", but you're not the one doing the work or paying for it.
- gmerc 1y agoAhh classic free market cop out.
- FallCheeta7373 1y agoif the smartest among us publishing for academia cannot figure this out, then who will?
- hammyhavoc 1y agoNot infrequently, someone being smart in one field doesn't necessarily mean they can solve problems in another. I know some brilliant people, but, well, putting it kindly, they're as useful as a chocolate teapot outside of their specific area of academic expertise.
- kazinator 1y agoNope! There have in fact been education campaigns about the evils of URL shorteners for years: how they pose security risks (used for shortening malicious URLs), and how they stop working when their domain is temporarily or permanently down. The authors just had their heads too far up their academic asses to have heard of this.
- bbuut 1y agoFree market is a euphemism for “there’s no physics demanding this be worked on” If you want it archived do it. You seem to want someone else to take up your concerns. An HN genius should be able to crawl this and fix it. But you’re not geniuses. They’re too busy to be low affect whiners on social media.
- QuantumGood 1y agoWhen they began offering this, their rep for ending services was already so bad I refused to consider goo.gl. Amazing for how many years now they have introduced then ended services with large user bases. Gmail being in "beta" for five years was, weirdly, to me, a sign they might stick with it.
- justinmayer 1y agoIn the first segment of the very first episode of the Abstractions podcast, we talked about Google killing its goo.gl URL obfuscation service and why it is such a craven abdication of responsibility. Have a listen, if you’re curious: Overcast link to relevant chapter: https://overcast.fm/+BOOFexNLJ8/02:33 https://overcast.fm/+BOOFexNLJ8/02:33 Original episode link: https://shows.arrowloop.com/@abstractions/episodes/001-the-rubber-never-hits-the-road https://shows.arrowloop.com/@abstractions/episodes/001-the-r...
- asdll 1y ago> An absolute act of cultural vandalism. It makes me mad also, but something we have to learn the hard way is that nothing in this world is permanent. Never, ever depend on any technology to persist. Not even URLs to original hosts should be required. Inline everything.
- lubujackson 1y agoTruly, the most Googly of sunsets.
- mrcslws 1y agoFrom the blog post: "more than 99% of them had no activity in the last month" https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-url-shortener-links-will-no-longer-be-available/ https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-url-shortener-li... This is a classic product data decision-making fallacy. The right question is "how much total value do all of the links provide", not "what percent are used".
- bayindirh 1y ago> The right question is "how much total value do all of the links provide", not "what percent are used". Yes, but it doesn't bring in the sweet promotion home, unfortunately. Ironically, if 99% of them doesn't see any traffic, you can scale back the infra, run it in 2 VMs, and make sure a single person can keep it up as a side quest, just for fun (but, of course, pay them for their work). This beancounting really makes me sad.
- ahstilde 1y ago> just for fun (but, of course, pay them for their work). Doing things for fun isn't in Google's remit
- ceejayoz 1y agoIt used to be. AdSense came from 20% time!
- kevindamm 1y agoAlas, it was, once upon a time.
- morkalork 1y agoThen they shouldn't have offered it as a free service in the first place. It's like that discussion about how Google in all its 2-ton ADHD gorilla glory will enter an industry, offer a (near) free service or product, decimate all competition, then decide its not worth it and shutdown. Leaving a desolate crater behind of ruined businesses, angry and abandoned users.
- jaydenmilne 1y agoArchiveTeam is trying to brute force the entire URL space before its too late. You can run a Virtualbox VM/docker image (ArchiveTeam Warrior) to help (unique IPs are needed). I've been running it for a couple months and found a million. https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior
- pimlottc 1y agoLooks like they have saved 8000+ volumes of data to the Internet Archive so far [0]. The project page for this effort is here [1]. 0: https://archive.org/details/archiveteam_googl https://archive.org/details/archiveteam_googl 1: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Goo.gl https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Goo.gl
- localtoast 1y agoDocker container FTW. Thanks for the heads-up - this is a project I will happily throw a Hetzner server at.
- wobfan 1y agoSame here. I am geniunely asking myself for what though. I mean, they'll receive a list of the linked domains, but what will they do with that?
- localtoast 1y agoIt's not only goo.gl links they are actively archiving. Take a look at their current tasks. https://tracker.archiveteam.org/ https://tracker.archiveteam.org/
- fragmede 1y agosave it, forever*. * as long as humanly possible, as is archive.org's mission.
- fsmv 1y agoThey are downloading and archiving the pages that the links point to
- Brajeshwar 1y agoWhat will it really cost for Google (each year) to host whatever was created, as static files, for as long as possible?
- malfist 1y agoIt'd probably cost a couple tens of dollars, and Google is simply too poor to afford that these days. They've spent all their money on AI and have nothing left
- chneu 1y agoit's not the cost of hosting/sharing it. It's the cost employing people to maintain this alongside other google products. So, at minimum, assuming there are 2 people maintaining this at google that probably means it would cost them $250k/yr in just payroll to keep this going. That's probably a very low ball estimate on the people involved but it still shows how expensive theses old products can be.
- jedberg 1y agoI have only given this a moment's thought, but why not just publish the URL map as a text file or SQLLite DB? So at least we know where they went? I don't think it would be a privacy issue since the links are all public?
- devrandoom 1y agoAre they all public? Where can I see them?
- jedberg 1y agoYou can brute force them. They don't have passwords. The point is the only "security" is knowing the short URL.
- Alifatisk 1y agoI don't think so, but you can find the indexed urls here https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A"goo.gl" https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A"goo.gl" it's about 9,6 million links. And those are what got indexed, it should be way more out there
- sltkr 1y agoI'm surprised Google indexes these short links. I expected them to resolve them to their canonical URL and index that instead, which is what they usually do when multiple URLs point to the same resource.
- chneu 1y agoarchiveteam has the list at over 2billion urls with over a billion left to archive.
- DominikPeters 1y agoIt will include many URLs that are semi-private, like Google Docs that are shared via link.
- 1y ago
- cyp0633 1y agoThe runner of Compiler Explorer tried to collect the public shortlinks and do the redirection themselves: Compiler Explorer and the Promise of URLs That Last Forever (May 2025, 357 points, 189 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44117722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44117722
- pluc 1y agoSomeone should tell Google Maps
- ourmandave 1y agoA comment said they stopped making new links and announced back in 2018 it would be going away. I'm not a google fanboi and the google graveyard is a well known thing, but this has been 6+ years coming.
- goku12 1y agoFor one, not enough people seem to be aware of it. They don't seem to have given that announcement the importance and effort it deserved. Secondly, I can't say that they have a good migration plan when shutting down their services. People scrambling like this to backup the data is rather common these days. And finally, this isn't a service that can be so easily replaced. Even if people knew that it was going away, there would be short-links that they don't remember, but are important nevertheless. Somebody gave an example above - citations in research papers. There isn't much thought given to the consequences when decisions like this are taken. Granted that it was a free service and Google is under no obligation to keep it going. But if they were going to be so casual about it, they shouldn't have offered it in the first place. Or perhaps, people should take that lesson instead and spare themselves the pain.
- chneu 1y agoI just went through the old thread and it's comments. It appears google didn't specifically state they were going to end the service. They hinted that links would continue working, but new ones would not be able to be created. It was left a bit open-ended, and that likely made people think the links would work indefinitely. This seems to be echoed by the archiveteam scrambling to get this archived. I figure they would have backed these up years ago if it was more well known.
- micromacrofoot 1y agoThis is just being a poor citizen of the web, no excuses. Google is a 2 trillion dollar company, keeping these links working indefinitely would probably cost less than what they spend on homepage doodles.
- insane_dreamer 1y agothe lesson? never trust industry
- cpeterso 1y agoGoogle’s own services generate goo.gl short URLs (Google Maps generates https://maps.app.goo.gl/ https://maps.app.goo.gl/ URLs for sharing links to map locations), so I assume this shutdown only affects user-generated short URLs. Google’s original announcement doesn’t say as such, but it is carefully worded to specify that short URLs of the “https://goo.gl/ https://goo.gl/* format” will be shut down. Google’s probably trying to stop goo.gl URLs from being used for phishing, but doesn’t want to admit that publicly.
- growthwtf 1y agoThis actually makes the most logical sense to me, thank you for the idea. I don't agree with the way they're doing it of course but this probably is risk mitigation for them.
- cedws 1y agoThat could be an explanation but even so, they could continue to serve the redirects on some other domain so that at the very least people can just change goo.gl to something else and still access whatever the link was to.
- ElijahLynn 1y agoOMFG - Google should keep these up forever. What a hit to trust. Trust with Google was already bad for everything they killed, this is another dagger.
- phyzix5761 1y agoPeople still trust Google?
- musicale 1y agoHow surprising. https://killedbygoogle.com https://killedbygoogle.com
- hinkley 1y agoThat needs a chart.
- krunck 1y agoStop MITMing your content. Don't use shorteners. And use reasonable URL patterns on your sites.
- Cyan488 1y agoI have been using a shortening service with my own domain name - it's really handy, and I figure that if they go down I could always manually configure my own DNS or spin up some self-hosted solution.
- pfdietz 1y agoOnce again we are informed that Google cannot be trusted with data in the long term.
- davidczech 1y agoI don't really get it, it must cost peanuts to leave a static map like this up for the rest of Google's existence as a company.
- nikanj 1y agoThere’s two things that are real torture to google dev teams: 1) Being told a product is completed and needs no new features or changes 2) Being made to work on legacy code
- gedy 1y agoAt least they didn't release a 2 new competing d.uo or re.ad, etc shorteners and expect you to migrate
- JimDabell 1y agoCloudflare offered to keep it running and were turned away: https://x.com/elithrar/status/1948451254780526609 https://x.com/elithrar/status/1948451254780526609 Remember this next time you are thinking of depending upon a Google service. They could have kept this going easily but are intentionally breaking it.
- fourseventy 1y agoGoogle killing their domains service was the last straw for me. I started moving all of my stuff off of Google since then.
- nomel 1y agoI'm still shocked that my google voice number still functions after all these years. It makes me assume it's main purpose is to actually be an honeypot of some sort, maybe for spam call detection.
- mrj 1y agoShhh don't remind them
- throwyawayyyy 1y agoPretty sure you can thank the FCC for that :)
- joshstrange 1y agoBecause IIRC it’s essentially completely run by another company (I want to say Bandwidth?) and, again my memories might be fuzzy, originally came from an acquisition of a company called Grand Central. My guess is it just keeps chugging along with little maintenance needed by Google itself. The UI hasn’t changed in a while from what I’ve seen.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- charlesabarnes 1y agoNow I'm wondering why did chrome change the behavior to use share.google links if this will be the inevitable outcome
- Bluestein 1y agoAnother one for the Google [G]raveyard.-
- fnord77 1y agothey attempted this in 2018 https://9to5google.com/2018/03/30/google-url-shortener-shut-down/ https://9to5google.com/2018/03/30/google-url-shortener-shut-...
- quesera 1y agoFrom the 2018 announcement: > URL Shortener has been a great tool that we’re proud to have built. As we look towards the future, we’re excited about the possibilities of Firebase Dynamic Links Perhaps relatedly, Google is shutting down Firebase Dynamic Links too, in about a month (2025-08-25).
- chneu 1y agoThanks for pointing this out. That's hilarious.
- pkilgore 1y agoGoogle probably spends more money a month than what it would take to preserve this service on coffee creamer for a single conference room.
- pentestercrab 1y agoThere seems to have been a recent uptick in phishers using goo.gl URLs. Yes, even without new URLs being accepted by registering expired domains with an old reference.
- hinkley 1y agoWhat’s their body count now? Seems like they’ve slowed down the killing spree, but maybe it’s just that we got tired of talking about them.
- theandrewbailey 1y ago297 https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- lrvick 1y agoYet another reminder to never trust corpotech to be around long term.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoDiscussion on the source from 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40998549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40998549
- andrii9 1y agoUgh, I used to use https://fuck.it https://fuck.it for short links too. Still legendary domain though.
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoNoticed recently on some google properties where there are Share buttons that it's generating share.google links now instead of goo.gl. Is that the same shortening platform running it?
- xutopia 1y agoGoogle is making harder and harder to depend on their software.
- christophilus 1y agoThat’s a good thing from my perspective. I wish they’d crush YouTube next. That’s the only Google IP I haven’t been able to avoid.
- chneu 1y agoThe alternatives just aren't there, either. Nebula is okay but not great. Floatplane is too exclusive. Vimeo..okay. But maybe a youtube disruption would be good for video on the internet. or it might be bad. idk.
- david422 1y agoSomewhat related - I wanted to add short urls to a project of mine. I was looking around at a bunch of url shorteners - and then realized it would be pretty simple to create my own. It's my content pointed to my own service, so I don't have to worry about 3rd party content or other services going down.
- spankalee 1y agoAs an ex-Googler, the problem here is clear and common, and it's not the infrastructure cost: it's ownership. No one wants to own this product. - The code could be partially frozen, but large scale changes are constantly being made throughout the google3 codebase, and someone needs to be on the hook for approving certain changes or helping core teams when something goes wrong. If a service it uses is deprecated, then lots of work might need to be done. - Every production service needs someone responsible for keeping it running. Maybe an SRE, thought many smaller teams don't have their own SREs so they manage the service themselves. So you'd need some team, some full reporting chain all the way up, to take responsibility for this. No SWE is going to want to work on a dead product where no changes are happening, no manager is going to care about it. No director is going to want to put staff there rather than a project that's alive. No VP sees any benefit here - there's only costs and risks. This is kind of the Reader situation all over again (except for the fact that a PM with decent vision could have drastically improved and grown Reader, IMO). This is obviously bad for the internet as a whole, and I personally think that Google has a moral obligation to not rug pull infrastructure like this. Someone there knows that critical links will be broken, but it's in no one's advantage to stop that from happening. I think Google needs some kind of "attic" or archive team that can take on projects like this and make them as efficiently maintainable in read-only mode as possible. Count it as good-will marketing, or spin it off to google.org and claim it's a non-profit and write it off. Side note: a similar, but even worse situation for the company is the Google Domains situation. Apparently what happened was that a new VP came into the org that owned it and just didn't understand the product. There wasn't enough direct revenue for them, even though the imputed revenue to Workspace and Cloud was significant. They proposed selling it off and no other VPs showed up to the meeting about it with Sundar so this VP got to make their case to Sundar unchallenged. The contract to sell to Squarespace was signed before other VPs who might have objected realized what happened, and Google had to buy back parts of it for Cloud.
- rs186 1y agoMany good points, but if you don't mind me asking: if you were at Google, would you be willing to be the lead of that archive team, knowing that you'll be stuck at this position for the next 10 years, with the possibility of your team being downsized/eliminated when the wind blows slightly in the other direction?
- romaniv 1y agoURL shorteners were always a bad idea. At the rate things are going I'm not sure people in a decade or two won't say the same thing about URLs and the Web as whole. The fact that there is no protocol-level support for archiving, versioning or even client-side replication means that everything you see on the Web right now has an overwhelming probability to permanently disappear in the near future. This is an astounding engineering oversight for something that's basically the most popular communication system and medium in the world and in history. Also, it's quite conspicuous that 30+ years into this thing browsers still have no built-in capacity to store pages locally in a reasonable manner. We still rely on "bookmarks".
- rsync 1y agoA reminder that the "Oh By"[1] everything-shortener not only exists but can be used as a plain old URL shortener[2]. Unlike the google URL shortener, you can count on "Oh By" existing in 20 years. [1] https://0x.co https://0x.co [2] https://0x.co/hnfaq.html https://0x.co/hnfaq.html
- mymacbook 1y agoWhy is everyone jumping on the blame the victims bandwagon?! This is not the fault of users whether they were scientists publishing papers or the fault of the general public sharing links. This is absolutely 100% on Alphabet/Google. When you blame your customer, you have failed.
- eviks 1y agoThey weren't customers since they didn't buy anything, and yes, as sweet as "free" is, it is the fault of users to expect free to last forever
- ccgreg 1y agoCommon Crawl's count of unique goo.gl links is approximately 10 million. That's in our permanent archive, so you'll be able to consult them in the future. No search engine or crawler person will ever recommend using a shortener for any reason.
- bunbun69 1y agoIsn’t this a good thing? It forces people to think now before making decisions
- mococa 1y agoNever trusted on Google after Google Reader.
- citrin_ru 1y agoLink shortener in read-only mode should be very cheap to run (highly available writes can be expensive in a distributes system but it's easier to make a read-only system work efficient). They are saving pennies but reminding everyone one more time that Google cannot be relied upon.