I think more important than URL shorteners is URL structure. It should work like a directory, where you can intuitively guess what subdirectories there are. Th

I think more important than URL shorteners is URL structure. It should work like a directory, where you can intuitively guess what subdirectories there are. This NYT link is actually pretty good. year/month/day/category/title is pretty nice. The query parameter ruins it, but that's kind of unavoidable if you want a reproducible link with extra data. Usually you can omit query parameters and the URL should still work.