10 ms·
About 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/scho
by edent 1y ago
About 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.
- Scoundreller 1y agono, seems to download entirely into memory. Moderate CPU usage on this i7 Macbook Air.
- 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.