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Comment by balakk | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious, what's with the cruddy URLs?

For eg: https://plus.google.com/113882113745075873153

Why the gargantuan number? Yeah, it's in trial, but still..

It's a strange irony that Google, the driving force behind the invention of SEO, often fail to bother with it themselves, even on extremely high-profile products.

As noted, Google Profiles have meaningless, unguessable URLs: https://plus.google.com/112349855959838705650

Items in the Chrome app store are similarly opaque: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/aidgmjkfmbhldhnhko... (As are all Chrome extensions:) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ddngkjbldiejbheifc...

YouTube videos have no title information at all: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfQhfYA2cH8

Orkut (a low blow I realize): http://www.orkut.com/Main#Profile?uid=16458042622225437726

News topics: http://news.google.com/news/more?pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&...

It confuses me.

It's not really surprising that Google doesn't care about SEO---after all they are the search engine.

I've not seen any evidence keyword URLs give any SEO benefit. If they once did, it doesn't appear to be the case now.

About the chrome extension urls, the source they use to generate those hashes and some interesting trivia here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1882981/google-chrome-alp...

It's like google wants to remind you what search was like prior to their participation. Webmaster forums are particularly funny example of this style of design which is almost aggressively search-unfriendly.

That's your gmail account ID. It hasn't changed since you registered for gmail.

I remember that the old Google profiles (before Google+ and before the Profiles relaunch) had an option to choose between a private and a public profile URL. The public version of the URL had your gmail username in it. The private one didnt, it had the your account ID in it. Apparrently they turned off the option for public profile URLs since Google+.

So apparently these URLs are there for privacy reasons. Not everyone who knows your email address should be able to find your profile.

The option of having your username in the URL is still there, but it looks like the setting needs to be toggled again for the new profile scheme. Check near the bottom on https://profiles.google.com/me/about/edit/d .

Edit: Strangely, the option shows up only sometimes when I click the edit button.

Too funny. I tried to view that url on my G2 and got a page saying my browser was not supported.

It prevents both information leakage (number of users/posts/etc), and enumeration. It could also contain routing information about where your data is actually stored behind the scenes, avoiding a directory lookup.

Maybe they want users to be searching for users and sell more ads, that's their main thing anyways.

I noticed that profiles.google.com vanity urls redirect to Plus.

plus.ly

http://gplus.to/

It's been used by googlers for more than a year already, so that's probably why the number is so high.

even a company the size of google doesn't have 112349855959838705650 employees

dude, that is not auto increment id in some database :)

that was my point.

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