7 ms·

What amazes me is that this wasn't the original plan. What product manager thinks "the best thing for our customers is to delete their data!". > We understand

What amazes me is that this wasn't the original plan. What product manager thinks "the best thing for our customers is to delete their data!". > We understand these links are embedded in countless documents, videos, posts and more, and we appreciate the input received. How did they think the links were being used?

borg16 1y ago
i read in an earlier thread for this on HN - "this is a classic example of data driven product decision" aka we can reduce costs by $x if we just stopped goo.gl links. Instead of actually wondering how this would impact the customers. Also helps that they are in a culture which does not mind killing services on a whim.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  If companies can spend billions on AI and not have anything in return and be okay with that in the ways of giving free stuff (okay, I'll admit not completely free since you are the product but still free) Then they should also be okay for keeping the goo.gl links honestly. Sounds kinda bad for some good will but this is literally google, the one thing google is notorious for is killing their products.
  - citizenpaul 1y ago
    This is basically modern SV business. This old data is costing us about a million a year to hold onto. KILL IT NOW WITH FIRE. Hey lets also dump 100 Billion dollars into this AI thing without any business plan or ideas to back it up this year. HOW FAST CAN YOU ACCEPT MY CHECK!
    - jiggawatts 1y ago
      Nobody wants to catch a falling knife, everybody wants to attach a lanyard to the moon rocket.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  The Google URL shortener stopped accepting new links around 2018. It has been deprecated for a long time. I doubt it was a cost-driven decision on the basis of running the servers. My guess would be that it was a security and maintenance burden that nobody wanted. They also might have wanted to use the domain for something else.
  - resize2996 1y ago
    "security and maintenance burden" == "cost" == "cost-driven decision"
    - aspenmayer 1y ago
      Capital inputs are one part of the equation. The human cost of mental and contextual overhead cannot be reduced to dollars and cents.
      - mixdup 1y ago
        Sure it can. It takes X people Y hours a day/month/week to perform tasks, including planning and digging up the context behind, related to this service. Those X people make Z dollars per year. It's an extremely simple math equation
        aspenmayer 1y ago
        Emotional labor doesn’t show up on a balance sheet.
  - cogman10 1y ago
    How much of a burden could this really be? The nature of something like this is that the cost to run it naturally goes down over time. Old links get clicked less so the hardware costs would be basically nothing. As for the actual software security, it's a URL shortener. They could rewrite the entire thing in almost no time with just a single dev. Especially since it's strictly hosting static links at this point. It probably took them more time and money to find inactive links than it'd take to keep the entire thing running for a couple of years.
- no_wizard 1y ago
  Arguably, this is them collecting the wrong types of data to inform decisions, if that isn't represented in the data.
- thevillagechief 1y ago
  One of the complaints about Google is that it's difficult to launch products due to bureaucracy. I'm starting to thing that's not a bad thing. If they'd done a careful analysis of the cost of jumping into this url-shortener bandwagon, we wouldn't be here. Maybe it's not a bad thing they move slower now.
  - margalabargala 1y ago
    I would bet that the salaries paid to the product managers behind shutting this down, during the time they worked on shutting it down, outweigh the annual cost of running the service by an order of magnitude.
- jerlam 1y ago
  Goo.gl didn't have customers, it had users. Customers pay, either with money or their personal data, now or the future. Goo.gl did not make any money or have a plan to do so in the future.
  - CydeWeys 1y ago
    One wonders why they don't, instead of showing down, display a 15s interstitial unskippable YouTube-style ad prior to redirecting. That way they'll make money, and they can fund the service not having to shut down, and there isn't any linkrot.
    - gloxkiqcza 1y ago
      This is such an evil idea.
      - xp84 1y ago
        Why is it evil? If we assume that a free URL shortener is a good thing, and that shutting one down is a bad thing, and given that every link shortener will have costs (not just the servers -- constant moderation needs, as scammers and worse use them) and no revenue. The only possible outcome is for them all to eventually shut down, causing unrecoverable linkrot. Given those options, an ad seems like a trivial annoyance to anyone who very much needs a very old link to work. Anyone who still has the ability to update their pages can always update their links.
      - sincerely 1y ago
        This is how every URL shortener on the internet worked used to work
      - CydeWeys 1y ago
        Well, it's either that or a paywall. Pick your poison.
  - franga2000 1y ago
    The monetary value of the goodwill and mindshare generated by such a free service is hard to calculate, but definitely significant. I wouldn't be surprised if it was more than it costs to run.
- j45 1y ago
  All while data and visibility is part of the business. Like other things spun down there must not be value in the links.
- manquer 1y ago
  Hard to imagine costs were ever a factor. For company running GCP and giving things like Colab TPUs free the costs of running a URL service would be trivial rounding number at best
  - b112 1y ago
    Outside of bandwidth, I could run this entire service on a raspberry pi. No, I'm not exaggerating. It's just a text end of url to full url lookup. I've handled far more traffic on single machines 20 years ago.
- observationist 1y ago
  At this point, anyone depending on Google for anything deserves to get burned. I don't know how much more clearly they could tell their users that Google has absolutely no respect for users without drone shipping boxes of excrement.
- miohtama 1y ago
  For all HN commenters: if you are not paying for it, you are not a customer and thus you should not complain.
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
So bizarre. Embedded links, docs, social posts, stuff that could be years and years old, and they're expecting traffic to them recently? Why do they seem to think their link shortener is only being used for like someone's social profile linktree or something. Some marketing person's bizarre view of how the web is being used.
troupo 1y ago
> How did they think the links were being used? Can't dig this document up right now, but in their Chrome dev process they say something along these lines: "even if a ferie is used by 0.01% of users, at scale that's a lot of users . Don't remove until you've made solely due impost is negligible". At Google scale I'm surprised [1] this is not applied everywhere. [1] Well, not that surprised
- cnst 1y ago
  Yup, 0.01% of users at scale is indeed a lot of users. This is exactly why many big companies like Amazon, Google and Mozilla still support TLSv1.0, for example, whereas all the fancy websites would return an error unless you're using TLSv1.3 as if their life depends on it. In fact, I just checked a few seconds ago with `lynx`, and Google Search even still works on plain old HTTP without the "S", too — no TLS required whatsoever to start with. Most people are very surprised by this revelation, and many don't even believe it, because it's difficult to reproduce this with a normal desktop browser, apart from lynx. But this also shows just out how out of touch Walmart's digital presence really is, because somehow they deem themselves to be important enough to mandate TLSv1.2 and the very latest browsers unlike all the major ecommerce heavyweights, and deny service to anyone who doesn't have the latest device with all the latest updates installed, breaking even the slightly outdated browsers even if they do support TLSv1.2.
- rs186 1y ago
  I guess the number of people who use Chrome to access files via FTP must be below 0.01% then. https://www.auslogics.com/en/articles/is-it-bad-that-google-removes-ftp/ https://www.auslogics.com/en/articles/is-it-bad-that-google-...
  - troupo 1y ago
    You can always justify the removal of something despite the guidelines
- pimlottc 1y ago
  A “ferie”?
cellover 1y ago
tail -f access.log maybe?
charcircuit 1y ago
One that is operating in an environment where strict privacy laws exist. User data stuck in legacy systems is a liability. Not only are things evolving internally within Google, laws are evolving externally and must be followed.
- b112 1y ago
  It's a redirect service. In archive mode, no private info is needed. No creator, no anything. Just link to link mapping.

borg16 1y ago

i read in an earlier thread for this on HN - "this is a classic example of data driven product decision" aka we can reduce costs by $x if we just stopped goo.gl links. Instead of actually wondering how this would impact the customers. Also helps that they are in a culture which does not mind killing services on a whim.

Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
If companies can spend billions on AI and not have anything in return and be okay with that in the ways of giving free stuff (okay, I'll admit not completely free since you are the product but still free) Then they should also be okay for keeping the goo.gl links honestly. Sounds kinda bad for some good will but this is literally google, the one thing google is notorious for is killing their products.
- citizenpaul 1y ago
  This is basically modern SV business. This old data is costing us about a million a year to hold onto. KILL IT NOW WITH FIRE. Hey lets also dump 100 Billion dollars into this AI thing without any business plan or ideas to back it up this year. HOW FAST CAN YOU ACCEPT MY CHECK!
  - jiggawatts 1y ago
    Nobody wants to catch a falling knife, everybody wants to attach a lanyard to the moon rocket.
Aurornis 1y ago
The Google URL shortener stopped accepting new links around 2018. It has been deprecated for a long time. I doubt it was a cost-driven decision on the basis of running the servers. My guess would be that it was a security and maintenance burden that nobody wanted. They also might have wanted to use the domain for something else.
- resize2996 1y ago
  "security and maintenance burden" == "cost" == "cost-driven decision"
  - aspenmayer 1y ago
    Capital inputs are one part of the equation. The human cost of mental and contextual overhead cannot be reduced to dollars and cents.
    - mixdup 1y ago
      Sure it can. It takes X people Y hours a day/month/week to perform tasks, including planning and digging up the context behind, related to this service. Those X people make Z dollars per year. It's an extremely simple math equation
      - aspenmayer 1y ago
        Emotional labor doesn’t show up on a balance sheet.
- cogman10 1y ago
  How much of a burden could this really be? The nature of something like this is that the cost to run it naturally goes down over time. Old links get clicked less so the hardware costs would be basically nothing. As for the actual software security, it's a URL shortener. They could rewrite the entire thing in almost no time with just a single dev. Especially since it's strictly hosting static links at this point. It probably took them more time and money to find inactive links than it'd take to keep the entire thing running for a couple of years.
no_wizard 1y ago
Arguably, this is them collecting the wrong types of data to inform decisions, if that isn't represented in the data.
thevillagechief 1y ago
One of the complaints about Google is that it's difficult to launch products due to bureaucracy. I'm starting to thing that's not a bad thing. If they'd done a careful analysis of the cost of jumping into this url-shortener bandwagon, we wouldn't be here. Maybe it's not a bad thing they move slower now.
- margalabargala 1y ago
  I would bet that the salaries paid to the product managers behind shutting this down, during the time they worked on shutting it down, outweigh the annual cost of running the service by an order of magnitude.
jerlam 1y ago
Goo.gl didn't have customers, it had users. Customers pay, either with money or their personal data, now or the future. Goo.gl did not make any money or have a plan to do so in the future.
- CydeWeys 1y ago
  One wonders why they don't, instead of showing down, display a 15s interstitial unskippable YouTube-style ad prior to redirecting. That way they'll make money, and they can fund the service not having to shut down, and there isn't any linkrot.
  - gloxkiqcza 1y ago
    This is such an evil idea.
    - xp84 1y ago
      Why is it evil? If we assume that a free URL shortener is a good thing, and that shutting one down is a bad thing, and given that every link shortener will have costs (not just the servers -- constant moderation needs, as scammers and worse use them) and no revenue. The only possible outcome is for them all to eventually shut down, causing unrecoverable linkrot. Given those options, an ad seems like a trivial annoyance to anyone who very much needs a very old link to work. Anyone who still has the ability to update their pages can always update their links.
    - sincerely 1y ago
      This is how every URL shortener on the internet worked used to work
    - CydeWeys 1y ago
      Well, it's either that or a paywall. Pick your poison.
- franga2000 1y ago
  The monetary value of the goodwill and mindshare generated by such a free service is hard to calculate, but definitely significant. I wouldn't be surprised if it was more than it costs to run.
j45 1y ago
All while data and visibility is part of the business. Like other things spun down there must not be value in the links.
manquer 1y ago
Hard to imagine costs were ever a factor. For company running GCP and giving things like Colab TPUs free the costs of running a URL service would be trivial rounding number at best
- b112 1y ago
  Outside of bandwidth, I could run this entire service on a raspberry pi. No, I'm not exaggerating. It's just a text end of url to full url lookup. I've handled far more traffic on single machines 20 years ago.
observationist 1y ago
At this point, anyone depending on Google for anything deserves to get burned. I don't know how much more clearly they could tell their users that Google has absolutely no respect for users without drone shipping boxes of excrement.
miohtama 1y ago
For all HN commenters: if you are not paying for it, you are not a customer and thus you should not complain.

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

So bizarre. Embedded links, docs, social posts, stuff that could be years and years old, and they're expecting traffic to them recently? Why do they seem to think their link shortener is only being used for like someone's social profile linktree or something. Some marketing person's bizarre view of how the web is being used.

troupo 1y ago

> How did they think the links were being used? Can't dig this document up right now, but in their Chrome dev process they say something along these lines: "even if a ferie is used by 0.01% of users, at scale that's a lot of users . Don't remove until you've made solely due impost is negligible". At Google scale I'm surprised [1] this is not applied everywhere. [1] Well, not that surprised

cnst 1y ago
Yup, 0.01% of users at scale is indeed a lot of users. This is exactly why many big companies like Amazon, Google and Mozilla still support TLSv1.0, for example, whereas all the fancy websites would return an error unless you're using TLSv1.3 as if their life depends on it. In fact, I just checked a few seconds ago with `lynx`, and Google Search even still works on plain old HTTP without the "S", too — no TLS required whatsoever to start with. Most people are very surprised by this revelation, and many don't even believe it, because it's difficult to reproduce this with a normal desktop browser, apart from lynx. But this also shows just out how out of touch Walmart's digital presence really is, because somehow they deem themselves to be important enough to mandate TLSv1.2 and the very latest browsers unlike all the major ecommerce heavyweights, and deny service to anyone who doesn't have the latest device with all the latest updates installed, breaking even the slightly outdated browsers even if they do support TLSv1.2.
rs186 1y ago
I guess the number of people who use Chrome to access files via FTP must be below 0.01% then. https://www.auslogics.com/en/articles/is-it-bad-that-google-removes-ftp/ https://www.auslogics.com/en/articles/is-it-bad-that-google-...
- troupo 1y ago
  You can always justify the removal of something despite the guidelines
pimlottc 1y ago
A “ferie”?

cellover 1y ago

tail -f access.log maybe?

charcircuit 1y ago

One that is operating in an environment where strict privacy laws exist. User data stuck in legacy systems is a liability. Not only are things evolving internally within Google, laws are evolving externally and must be followed.

b112 1y ago
It's a redirect service. In archive mode, no private info is needed. No creator, no anything. Just link to link mapping.