Down with URL shorteners | Hacker News Reader

Down with URL shorteners

jacquesmattheij.com

10 pointsjacquesm15 comments

I've been frustrated by short URLs in my Twitter feed too. So frustrated, in fact, that I wrote an app to "peel" them. It's a Chrome extension that shows you where the link is going before you click. Google App Engine fetches page headers on your behalf and gives you back the real link.

It's called LinkPeelr, and you can check it out here: http://linkpeelr.appspot.com

The ideal situation for URL shorteners (in my opinion) is for the short URLs to be provided by the content publisher AND the short URLs should easily translate to their long URLs.[1] Look at how YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC9Ss4dguu4 is shortened to http://youtu.be/lC9Ss4dguu4) or Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Wireless-Reader-Wifi-Graphite/d... translates to http://amzn.com/B002Y27P3M) does it, for a good example.

They aren't the shortest possible URLs, but they clearly show the content provider in the URL, which is great.

I actually created a web app and API (hosted on Google App Engine) to generate these publisher-provided short URLs, but never published it. I'll polish it off a bit tonight and post it here.

[1] This is my personal ideal. Being provided by the content publisher should be enough, in my opinion.

Google: [url shorteners evil].

What does your article add to this discussion, Jacques? I mean, besides points to your karma score? ;)

I'm not aware of any concerted effort to get rid of url shorteners (other than by the Libyan NIC, that is ;) ).

The authoritative place to start is probably 'joshu's article:

http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners.html

Yes, there is definitely a concerted effort to get rid of URL shorteners.

Fancy that. Ok, so reading that I guess what it brought to the table that was new is a way to get rid of them in an active way, rather than to wait for them to go quietly.

It's one step away from banning *.ly as a referrer ;)

I actually ended up banning most of the URL shortners in Delicious in like 2007ish...

(thanks for the mention, tptacek)

I just scanned all our text and outgoing links and it's amazing how much of this crap has crept in over the years. Time to do some housecleaning.

Really? I'm surprised someone as active as you on HN could have missed all of the shortner-hate.

Funny, I only got to thinking about them after the vb.ly stuff, how fragile this whole shortening thing is.

And as for me being so active on HN, there are lots of things I read here but not everything, the volume is just way too large for that, and besides my memory is good but not perfect.

It seemed to me that it was possible for website owners to take a more pro-active stance against url shorteners, hence the piece.

On websites URL shorteners don't make any sense anyway (other than click tracking, I completely missed that possibility).

I hate url shorteners too, for all the reasons the author lists and more. But the article is wrong in stating "They serve no purpose other than to create a short link..."

Actually, while that is their primary purpose, they are very attractive to the people who use them because they give you a click tracking on your instance of the URL post, regardless of who owns the target website.

For me, this is actually another negative of the whole concept of URL shorteners. But it's a huge draw for the people using them.

There has been increasing use of url shorteners by spammers. The problem is you don't know which domain you're heading to. My mantra: treat all short urls as spam.

Only issue is with the CMS urls. I think it should be made 'best practice' rather than just 'SEO optimization', to use URL rewriting by CMS developers.

That's why 301works exists (http://www.archive.org/details/301works). Granted, even if one of the URL shortener part of this group goes down, it would be a pain to get all the sort links replaced, but this would be possible.

CMS support for short links is an interesting and more healthy idea.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com