Goo.gl: Making URLs shorter for Google Toolbar and FeedBurner

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/making-urls-shorter-for-google-toolbar.html

by jeff18 • 17 years ago

51 22 17 years ago

googleblog.blogspot.com

mcav• 17 years ago

Just when I thought the URL shortener fad was on the way out...

lsb• 17 years ago

But Google knows the contents of each page, though.

If they were going to be awesome about it, they know what the page says, so they can just store an MD5 hash of it, and find what the new URL is, if it's still live, or serve a cached version if they can't find it.

That'd be pretty nifty.

RyanMcGreal• 17 years ago

They modestly omitted mentioning another point in favour of goo.gl:

* Chances are, we're not going to go out of business and break your shortened links any time soon.

anApple2• 17 years ago

* Chances are, we will log all the links you click and associate them to your account even though you don't want us to do it.

icey• 17 years ago

How is that different than any other link shortener? This reflexive Google hate is getting ridiculous.

geekles2• 17 years ago

Personally I like that. The more google records for me, the closer to a true lifestream we get. Saves me some work.

jeff182• 17 years ago

Do you have any reason to believe that Google does this, despite Google publicly stating that they do not? I really doubt Google would stake the entire reputation of an already extraordinarily profitable company for the sake of the stupidest conspiracy ever.

I mean just think about it... How valuable is goo.gl to Google really? It will probably be used by a tiny fraction of users and at best would give Google a tiny bit of extra data on you. Absolutely nothing, compared to Google Analytics or most of the other Google products.

Now how much would it cost to run an air tight conspiracy and block all whistle blowers in a large corporation like Google? Note, even one verifiable leak would create a gigantic shit storm, probably knocking billions off of Google's market cap, not including lawsuits and fines.

I think I'm going to side with occam's razor on this one and say it's probably safe to use goo.gl.

moron4hire2• 17 years ago

I never noticed a speed issue with TinyURL, so their third point is pretty silly to me. Also, add a 4th point, "Self-Serving: if the target page has moved, we get a chance to serve you a redirect with our ads on it".

ggrot• 17 years ago

How are they going to do that? They tell your browser to 301 to the target URL - the browser is what notices the target URL is a 404, not Google, so Google would have no way to know whether or not the target is gone. The target URLs could be private (only accessible to specific ips). Even if google crawled the page, they would have no way of knowing if your browser could reach it.

moron4hire2• 17 years ago

They wouldn't have any way to know for certain if you could get to it, but they would be able to tell for certain if you couldn't get to it, because they can't get to it from anywhere on their worldwide network. Something is better than nothing.

scorxn• 17 years ago

When this becomes general-use, Analytics integration will be a no-brainer, and awe.sm will not be happy.

euroclydon• 17 years ago

I think the real money is going to be in creating a physical URL shortening device. An appliance that sit on your network and rewrites every URL using a GUID.

geekles2• 17 years ago

Is it possible to use this with Chrome? I haven't seen a way yet. It seems kind of silly to leave out support for their own browser. Google toolbar requires IE or Firefox.

agotterer• 17 years ago

I think this is a good play for Google. I'm sick of URL shortening services, but if they are here to stay they might as well be backed by a company that will be around. This is also going to be very useful for them to trend real time sharing.

trezor• 17 years ago

Google is really hitting the lows these days.

They overhyped wave and when they launched it nobody knew how to use it for anything besides trolling, then Google trolled us and said that Chrome OS would only "support" SSD because seemingly there is nothing special about it except being overly crippled, but they want to make it look like it boots fast.

And now this, Google are jumping on the utterly useless URL shortening fad. Google is losing it.

Goo.gl: Making URLs shorter for Google Toolbar and FeedBurner

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