Tell HN: Goo.gl (Google link Shortener) is shutting down | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Goo.gl (Google link Shortener) is shutting down

When you visit the goo.gl homepage, this message appears:

> Starting March 30, 2018, we will be turning down support for goo.gl URL shortener. From April 13, 2018 only existing users will be able to create short links on the goo.gl console. You will be able to view your analytics data and download your short link information in csv format for up to one year, until March 30, 2019, when we will discontinue goo.gl. Previously created links will continue to redirect to their intended destination. Please see this blog post[1] for more details.

[1]: https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/03/transitioning-google-url-shortener.html?m=1

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Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16719272

> To refocus our efforts, we're turning down support for goo.gl over the coming weeks and replacing it with Firebase Dynamic Links[1] (FDL).

Hmm, so replacing something simple and straightforward with something incredibly complicated aimed at a different use case...

[1] https://firebase.google.com/products/dynamic-links/

That's Google for you!

Running an URL shortener. So effort. Wow :-)

PSA: You can make your own (relatively) shorter URLs if you're willing to guess at how to un-pretty site's URLs. My most common one is Amazon. Most URLs are amazon.com/dp/xxxxxxxxxxxxx. Knowing that you can take a nasty URL like:

https://www.amazon.com/Red-4TB-Hard-Disk-Drive/dp/B00EHBERSE...

and change it to:

https://amazon.com/dp/B00EHBERSE

That's 122 chars to 32 chars. This kind of tactic works for tons of sites.

Or just use http://a.co/gVf3K0x ...

the biggest difference here is I cannot tell if your link is amazon or if its gonna send me to a spam site or use your referral for amazon.

They're talking about generating the shorter link just by looking at the first one (e.g., in your head).

How do you get your link out of https://www.amazon.com/Red-4TB-Hard-Disk-Drive/dp/B00EHBERSE... without using a tool?

I think the idea is that, if you have the original link then you would also be able to find the shorter link by simply clicking share on the page and use short product link generated by Amazon.

In practice, it is unlikely for anyone to share an Amazon link without having navigated to the page at least once. Given most sites have this option, it might seem silly to some that one suggests manually shortening the URL in the address bar instead of just clicking share.

Correct, that was what I was saying, and I agree there are lots of scenarios where you want link shortening without generating a new random string.

How do you easily shorten down to that? The others all used the same product code...his is a random URL

I used Amazon an an example because they are the first I learned to do this trick with. I know Amazon has canonical ways to shorten URLs. Many other sites don't. Here's Monoprice:

https://www.monoprice.com/product?c_id=102&cp_id=10260&cs_id...

p_id is all that matters:

https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=29523

95 chars to 45 chars.

CDW is more fun. They expect some pretty part of the URL, but don't do anything with it. So you shorten it to 1 char if you want the link to still work:

https://www.cdw.com/product/Tripp-Lite-10ft-Cat6-Gigabit-Sna...

becomes:

https://www.cdw.com/product/T/934322

127 chars to 37.

FWIW, my link is not equivalent to the one I replied to, and this lazy comment of mine probably deserves downvotes for making it seem I was implying that. These a.co links are not generated until requested, and new ones are generated each time they are requested. OP pointing out that you can quickly link to a common unique ID is valuable. I was just pointing out that the existing link shortener is pretty good.

Amazon also has a hybrid between URL hacking and URL shortening: A short domain that redirects product codes.

https://amzn.com/B00EHBERSE

I always have fun doing that

This decision makes no sense to me. Why would Google pass on all of this free analytics data? They also use subdomains of goo.gl for a ton of their own products. Google Maps shareable links are maps.goo.gl, for example.

Oh, I don't think they will have any issues using those themselves.

They can't even keep a URL shortner service up and running?

It's more about what they want to promote instead than about whether or not they can pay for it.

Perhaps they got tired of spammers and scammers making use of their URL shortening service?

s/can't/won't/

In other words, a 80000-pound gorilla sits anywhere it damn wishes to. (Yes, I know that the original gorilla was two orders of magnitude smaller)

"We better get a bigger gorilla."

I suspect goo.gl sounds too much as a 'validated' Google link. Like the Amazon examples elsewhere in this thread. So users think falsely they can trust these links.

If true its actually surprising they kept the service going this long.

Can anyone explain to me what is the use case for URL shorteners? Other than for size limited messages like Twitter I guess.

Easier to remember URLs, and statistics about how many people visits them.

I use them in presentations, it's easier to have a really short URL on the slide for people. I'm not sure how common that is, but it's really handy. Other than that, I've not used them for anything.

They are easy to share/spell? though most of them are not that easy.

At posters, e.g. link to register for an event.

I use them to share maps links on chat, for example this:

https://goo.gl/maps/6zJsoaCTgTD2

is much better than this:

https://www.google.it/maps/place/Presidio+di+Francavilla+Fon...

They’re also good for including in SMS text messages. Or print media. Or for typing into browsers on devices with sub-optimal keyboards (from my own experience, I can think of the Xbox and the Kindle)

Can confirm that SMSs are still a thing in enterprise. Several of my clients use SMS a lot. Given the character limits, they tend to prefer short links so they can give more info in the actual text. We've just migrated from goo.gl to bit.ly on two of them.

I use my favorite one just for the laughs: http://www.shadyurl.com

* Kilobytely: The URL Lengthener || http://kilobytely.com/

http://kilobytely.com/sh6vk9ync1qf4tnc1qf4ti7wlazowlazod2rg5...

Situations where I want users to go to a long URL but they need to type it, or tracking. I want to know how many times my CraigsList ad was viewed, easy I'll just use a short URL for the image and see how many times the image got loaded.

One of the main use cases, and many vendors still do pitch this as a selling point - Analytics. You can put in custom tracking code (www.example.com/landingpage?utm_campaign=xyz&utm_source=abc) and share the same link (eg. a blog post) on different channels (facebook, email, youtube, etc) with different tracking parameters on the fly, so your analytics software can easily pick it up.

They are good for plain text emails, since a lot of email systems mangle plain text emails at ~ col 72.

Interestingly, Twitter has it's own built-in t.co URL shortener, so it's not even necessary for that. All links in a tweet are automatically 23 characters.

On some forums/CMSes bare links to YouTube are converted to full-sized previews automatically and you can't disable this behaviour. You just make a piece of text a plain hyperlink to a YouTube video and once you click "submit" the parser comes into the play and a huge picture appears in the middle of your text instead of a couple of words. Masking the link with goo.gl solves the problem and adds an extra goodie letting you see how many people have followed your link.

Shortened URLs are also easier to type by hand / read aloud and look prettier visually.

In short: working around broken 3rd party software, and tracking.

Situations where a long and nasty url is printed, say in a church bulletin, and so has to be transcribed by eye to be useful.

E.g. imagine a non tech savvy person having to read and type in https://m.signupgenius.com/#!/showSignUp/20f094ea5a928af85-f... to sign up for a church supper.

is.gd/ourchurch-supper2018 is so much easier.

I think Google is just shedding GDPR risks where it doesn't hurt revenue.

I used to use this to share my teaching material with my students from Google Drive, giving them a short and friendly URL seemed the most efficient way of sharing the material (Age varies between 18 - 99). Well, I don't know what I'm going to use now, probably tinylink, but somehow never liked 'em

Good riddance to one of the great phishing enablers.

The decision was so poorly communicated that even A Google Product like the campaign url builder no longer works. And I didn’t really understand why I’d use Firebase for shortening an url and after clicking on the page I’m more confused than ever. So... back to bit.ly ...

FYI I created a quick tool for this at http://xluh.co/repo.

It's basic now but I'll be building it up in light of this.

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