
Goo.gl: Making URLs shorter for Google Toolbar and FeedBurner - jeff18
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/making-urls-shorter-for-google-toolbar.html
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mcav
Just when I thought the URL shortener fad was on the way out...

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lsb
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.

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RyanMcGreal
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.

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anApple
* 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.

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

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anApple
The other link shorteners don't have access to your email, to your search
history, to your phone, to the places you look up on the internet, etc...

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bugs
I think you need to stop using google if you find this to be a problem.

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Barnabas
Is that really possible?

Google "how to stop using Google" -> "Did you mean 'how to stop using Bing'?"

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geekles
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.

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euroclydon
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.

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agotterer
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.

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

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moron4hire
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".

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ggrot
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.

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moron4hire
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.

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spicyj
The point, I think, is that you could still use the shortener to link to an
intranet or similar site that is not available to the public web.

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trezor
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.

