

Google’s official URL shortcut just for Google websites. - franze
http://g.co/

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quizbiz
I found it very odd that Google+ profiles don't have a clean URL. Something
like g.co/+nirlevy would be perfect.

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blauwbilgorgel
I thought no vanity URL's had something to do with their privacy policy:

> If you choose not to have search engines index your profile, your profile
> itself won't appear in Google search results. However: * Your profile will
> still remain visible to anyone with your profile URL.

From:
[http://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/static.py?hl=en&#...</a><p>If we
all had vanity URL's that spelled out our name, our private profiles could be
accessed by just guessing the URL.<p>Now your private profile is only visible
to those that know your specific URL and Googleplus ID.<p>I also think vanity
URL's, name changes, name squatting and celebrity verification is too much
manual work for Google's liking.

~~~
uxp
It also took Facebook quite a while to get vanity URLs out of the door. If the
Google+ team decided that they did not want to release it to the public until
it had feature parity with Facebook, then we never would have seen G+.

We should all give them time to tweak the site and figure out what features
people actually want and which ones are actually important.

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evilswan
Why do we need shorter and shorter URLs? Goo.gl was short enough - is this
just because of Twitter's (semi-arbitrary) 140 char limit?

In my view, shorteners should be for making URLs more manageable, human-
readable, paste-able, etc - not for saving space necessarily.

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haberman
I suggest clicking on the link before asking obvious questions.

"Whenever you see a short “g.co” link, you can trust that it will always take
you to a Google product or service. We also have a public URL shortener at
goo.gl. You can use this to shorten up URLs across the web."

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brackin
I prefer Goo.gl as it looks more like Google but I guess the shorter the
better. There's <http://gplus.co/> for Google profiles at the moment
(unofficial) so G.co would be cool.

Update: I thought they'd just replaced Goo.gl but looks like it's just
internal. Goo.gl started off as just internal too.

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drcode
Does this have a use? I thought I might be able to type in docs.g.co, etc. but
that doesn't work.

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corin_
I would assume it's for on-the-fly generation of links. The example I can
think of (which they're not actually using it for) would be for Google Maps,
with it's horrible long URLs, give the user a g.co link when they ask for the
link to share.

They did actually used to do that (with goo.gl) but apparently have stopped,
perhaps it is soon to be brought back under g.co

But yeah, it's essentially the same as Twitter's t.co, except that not only
does it have to have been created automatically by Google (like t,co), it also
has to link directly to a page on Google's servers (unlike t.co).

Thank God for Google owning YouTube, which ensures morons can still rick roll.

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pitdesi
Any idea how much one of these single letter .co domains costs?

BTW - in case you were wondering, the other single letter .co domain names
that are taken are t.co (twitter shortener), o.co (overstock), x.co (godaddy
shortener), a.co,k.co,z.co (Amazon owns but hasn't done anything with them),
e.co (owned by a squatter)

~~~
bostonpete
> a.co,k.co,z.co (Amazon owns but hasn't done anything with them), e.co (owned
> by a squatter)

So what's the difference between Amazon and a squatter here?

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fuzzythinker
I guess difference being intention. Amazon most likely intents to use it, or
reverses the right to for some planned or unplanned products. A squatter by
definition intents to resell it.

