

Google URL shortener available to the public - stevefink
http://goo.gl/

======
stevefink
I know there's a plethora of URL shorteners these days, and most platform
providers (eg: Twitter) are introducing their own so they can harvest
analytics themselves. For whatever reason though, I keep trusting Google with
all of my most personal information. I don't know if that's a good or bad
thing, but I have a feeling this will become my standard URL shortener just as
Google Apps has become my standard for email, invoicing customers, document
management and scheduling. Not to mention Google Reader for having information
on all the RSS feeds I visit and Google's search knowing what links I am
visiting daily, and probably thirty other products I'm using that stores my
information on their servers.

~~~
brown9-2
This is a tangent but: how do you invoice customers with Google Apps?

~~~
stevefink
I actually started my invoicing life with Zoho Invoice. They have since become
available on Google Apps, which is super convenient for me, as a Google Apps
user: <http://www.zoho.com/invoice/zohoinvoice-for-googleapps.html>

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jpablo
Why do we need url shorteners again ?

When I see a shortened URL the probabilities of me clicking the link go down
to almost zero.

~~~
niels_olson
I had the same question. Until last week when I sent out a link to a google
spreadsheet, and my awesome </sarcasm> Navy Marine Corps Intranet Windows
XP/Outlook 2007/Exchange system broke the link across two lines (but only
after it was sent), and then every single recipient (about 100 physicians)
said they couldn't see the document. I now use tinyurl.

~~~
ciupicri
Why didn't you use a proper link in an HTML email?

~~~
telemachos
Many people still prefer plain text email. I certainly do.

~~~
ryanjkirk
I prefer text email in theory. It's cleaner, simpler. Text for messages,
that's how the web was meant to work, right?

I also cringe when I purple text in Comic Sans, as well as other
unmentionables.

Yet, when I want to emphasize something, I hate using asterisks. It's not
semantically correct, and it looks ugly. And how do you differentiate between
underline and italics?

For this reason I support HTML email.

~~~
pilif
Using asterisk for italics and underlines (_) for underlines is an age-old
convention that predates the web and HTML email by years.

I much prefer plaintext only mails. Not only are they readable on _any_
device, I also don't have to be afraid of getting my machine infected by who-
knows-what.

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andymoe
Nice simple public stats: <http://goo.gl/info/Jvhu#two_hours>

Not a huge fan of the flash chart though.

<http://goo.gl/Jvhu>

<http://goo.gl/Jvhu.qr>

EDIT: Better graph

~~~
raphar
Strange... : I clicked in the above url.

Then I copied the resulting url (<http://www.magicbeef.com/>)

After pasting it in google service, it produced a different short url:
<http://goo.gl/YH1c>

I first assumed that every destination would render an unique short url, but
thats not the case. This way google knows the full stats of
<http://www.magicbeef.com/>. But you can only know the real stats if you know
ALL the short urls pointing to it. :)

EDIT: I my short url stats page theres a notice: "119 total clicks on all
goo.gl short URLs pointing to this long URL"

EDIT: Notice the browser stats of the link (<http://goo.gl/info/Jvhu>) Almost
NO IE. Also less than a half windows.

~~~
kelnos
Probably because of the analytics -- if you create a short URL and post it
somewhere, you want to know how many people (etc.) clicked _your_ link, not
how many people clicked any link that goes to the same place through the
shortener.

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walkon
Is it just me, or was I able to "shorten" an already goo.gl shortened url?

<http://goo.gl/fBUb> \--> <http://goo.gl/Bkmv> \-->
<http://news.ycombinator.com>

They don't want to allow this, do they?

~~~
brown9-2
I had no problem creating links about five layers deep:

<http://goo.gl/87bM> \--> <http://goo.gl/4P9R>

<http://goo.gl/4P9R> \--> <http://goo.gl/7W5A>

<http://goo.gl/7W5A> \--> <http://goo.gl/Wcsa>

<http://goo.gl/Wcsa> \--> <http://goo.gl/qzcb>

<http://goo.gl/qzcb> \--> <http://goo.gl/>

~~~
simonsarris
Amusingly, I clicked the first link which took me to goo.gl, and closed the
window to see every one of your links turn 'visited', giving me instant
confirmation that I did indeed visit each (in spite of there being nothing in
the back-history)

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jnoller
Ugh. Google entering this pretty much wipes out the space - companies like
bit.ly are going to need to work on seriously differentiating themselves from
the pack, and even then I don't think they're long for the world.

I can honestly say I hope to never be in a market - or working on a product -
where google suddenly decides to enter the game. Even if their offering sucks,
or is broken, it sucks all the air out of the room because it's OMG Google.

~~~
Lewisham
I don't think anyone really believed that something you can hack together in
twenty minutes, where your business plan is completely based on "for as long
as Twitter doesn't do one", really counts as a "space". Anyone who invested in
it deserved to get burned.

bit.ly were working on partnerships with publishers as their means of getting
some monetization, but that's all I've really seen.

I'd prefer the Google one to the others, because at least I have some
guarantee that the Google one won't go away.

~~~
cadr
Like Wave didn't go away?

~~~
iheartmemcache
To be fair, Wave is still functional and Google announced intentions of
releasing "Wave in a Box" (1). And they have explicitly said they'll provide a
method to export existing data. Either way, their decommissioning of Wave is a
lot more responsible than, say, what Xmarks is doing. I trust Google a lot
more than a fly-by-night startup to gracefully shutdown their services.

(1) [http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-
source-n...](http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-source-next-
steps-wave-in-box.html)

------
fletchowns
I wonder what the web will be like in 10 years when most of these URL
shorteners don't exist anymore and we're just left with a web full of links
that go nowhere. I'm sure the Google one will survive, seems like we shouldn't
have to use these URL shorteners at all though.

~~~
jberryman
i agree with you, but how many of those _unshortened links_ do you think will
exist 10 years from now? i think the web is like a brain in which memory is
active, not static. it`s just a bit too young for that to be obvious.

~~~
drv
At least the unshortened links have a chance of being scraped by things like
archive.org; I wonder if it scrapes anything meaningful from the popular URL
shorteners.

~~~
bigfudge
Actually, scraping only links from shorteners would be a a good strategy form
preserving what is worth preserving.

~~~
mahmud
Like what? Junk with referral IDs?

------
msg
There are a couple of Greasemonkeys to lengthen shortened URLs. Hopefully they
will be updated soon.

[http://userscripts.org/scripts/search?q=expand+URL+shortener...](http://userscripts.org/scripts/search?q=expand+URL+shortener&x=0&y=0)

~~~
nir
I made a simple URL lengthening JSON/P web service:
<http://therealurl.appspot.com/> \- will be happy to help any devs working on
these scripts.

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werftgh
Just out of interest - do the top level DNSs look at the entire address or is
Greenland's main internet supplier going to melt under the load of redirecting
everything to Google?

~~~
Matt_Cutts
My guess is that Greenland can handle the load just fine. :)

~~~
werftgh
The country has a population of 50,000 I don't know how good their
connectivity is but I'm guessing Google has quite a few more users than that.

Hopefully the ISP's DNS caches goo.gl and doesn't just send it all to root .gl
to handle!

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albertzeyer
goo.gl has been around for quite a while. Is there something new I don't see
here?

Edit: Ah, its website is just new. Here the original post:
[http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-url-
short...](http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-url-shortener-
gets-website.html)

There was already a Chrome extension since the beginning.

~~~
netaddict
Earlier they did not offer custom URL shortening. goo.gl was used by Google
services like Reader, YouTube but it was not open to public.

~~~
albertzeyer
Hm but with that Chrome extension, it worked. So I guess there was an open API
already.

~~~
JeremyBanks
The Chrome extension reverse-engineered the API from the Google toolbar, it
wasn't officially released.

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empika
Its obvious that we need shorteners, the original purpose being email but
Twitter bucked that trend. So now, what we dont need is more URL shorteners.
What we do need is more sites to implement their own shortening like YouTube
and Flickr (eg, <http://youtu.be/3jDfSqtG2E4> and <http://flic.kr/p/MGuRJ>).
Its all about the rev canonical. This way, a shortened URL will stay about as
long as that site is about and the internets doesn't break.

People seem to want click stats though, although i dont see why you cant get
these out of google analytics etc.

Check out <http://revcanonical.appspot.com/> for more.

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cosgroveb
Interesting that all click analytics are public...

~~~
jonknee
Same for Bit.ly...

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eiji
404: Page not found

JS required! A new google-low and a big disappointment.

~~~
Matt_Cutts
I think we can do a push for that. Check back in a day or so.

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zacharycohn
[edit - Nevermind, solved below in the comments.] Does anyone know how these
work long-term? This one shortens a URL to 4 characters, so for a potentially
major URL shortener, there is a relatively low number of possible outputs.

Once they hit their limit, do they start erasing the oldest ones? The most
inactive ones?

For shorteners that give consistent shortened URLs (i.e. everytime you shorten
the same input URL, you get the same shortened output URL), how do they deal
with hitting their maximum?

~~~
acangiano
> Once they hit their limit, do they start erasing the oldest ones? The most
> inactive ones?

Let's do the math. If we assume that a service only uses a-z, A-Z and 0-9 as
characters for the shortened URL, we have a set of 62 characters.

/x -> 62

/xx -> 62^2 = 3,844

/xxx -> 62^3 = 238,328

/xxxx -> 62^4 = 14,776,336

/xxxxx -> 62^5 = 916,132,832

/xxxxxx -> 62^6 = 56,800,235,584

In the worst case scenario, the URL shortener will have to use a 6 character
identifier at some point, giving them a complessive coverage of almost 58
billion URLs.

The 4 characters they are currently using will only be enough for a while.
They'll switch to 5 soon enough.

~~~
brfox
I tired about 10 random ones and 3 were real links. So are they approx 30%
full already of the 4 character urls? I guess you better not shorten a url to
a page you don't want to be public, because then the address will be easy to
guess.

------
Tichy
In all the excitement, we forgot to ask about the API. I am curious what they
will provide, and with what limits.

One big problem I had with bit.ly on Twitter is there was no way to get all
shortened URLs pointing to a "real" URL. This was a problem because I wanted
to search for references to the "real" URL.

The lack of that feature of course empowered dedicated services like backtype
(I suppose), who have special deals with Twitter so that they can get all
references.

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ez77
Official announcement: [http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-
url-short...](http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-url-
shortener-gets-website.html)

... or simply <http://goo.gl/5av9> =)

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adam-_-
Could they not have bought <http://g.gl>?

~~~
Matt_Cutts
No, we couldn't. Unfortunately, Greenland doesn't sell X.gl or XX.gl domains.
So goo.gl was the shortest we could get.

~~~
werftgh
Greenland's GDP is <$1Bn and Google is worth $50bn couldn't you have just
bought them?

You could turn the entire country into a passively cooled data center!

~~~
tonfa
I thought Greenland had some kind of relationship with Denmark.

~~~
werftgh
I think they are now "seeing other people" after Denmark made some comment
about expanding glaciers that Greenland took personally !

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raphar
Mystery links! check this two: <http://goo.gl/MTtd> <http://goo.gl/jDpb>

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dsspence
Entering goo.gl should return itself don't you think?

~~~
Matt_Cutts
There's a little Easter egg where goo.gl/e will go to Google. :)

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tectonic
Since these are almost incremental, it's easy to guess existing links. There
must be both good and bad uses for this...

------
bretthellman
What happened to Google innovating? At least they included a QR Code...

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billmcneale
Can we have a bookmarklet or a sidebar, like bit.ly?

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faramarz
Now can we get a bookmarket?

anyone?

~~~
Matt_Cutts
faramarz, bookmarklets like <http://www.labnol.org/internet/googl-
bookmarklet/11871/> should work just fine. To get history/analytics, just
login to goo.gl and you're good to go.

Instead of a bookmarklet, I prefer to use this Chrome extension:
[https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/iblijlcdoidgdpfk...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/iblijlcdoidgdpfknkckljiocdbnlagk)

~~~
faramarz
Thanks Matt :)

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inmygarage
url shorteners are so 2009.

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yanw
An obvious next step would be integrating Google Analytics.

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c00p3r
What hashing function they use?

~~~
mahmud
Base62.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1119722/base-62-conversio...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1119722/base-62-conversion-
in-python)

A case-insensitive variant is Base36:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_36>

I remember you being a Lisp programmer; it's built into CL's Format function:

    
    
      (format t "~36r" 9999) ==> 7PR

