Google’s official URL shortcut just for Google websites. | Hacker News Reader

Google’s official URL shortcut just for Google websites.

g.co

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

why the second slash?

http://g.co/+nirlevy

one unnecessary character saved

EDIT: the second slash g.co/+/nirlevy version was in the orignal comment (which was obviously updated without notice)

Bah meant to update you and thank you but I was distracted and went back to work. I am sorry.

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&#...

If we all had vanity URL's that spelled out our name, our private profiles could be accessed by just guessing the URL.

Now your private profile is only visible to those that know your specific URL and Googleplus ID.

I also think vanity URL's, name changes, name squatting and celebrity verification is too much manual work for Google's liking.

They used to have vanity URLs as a drop-down option in the Profile (I got it when I created my profile to try out Buzz last year). Even though I deleted the profile, I still had the option to choose it when I re-created the profile. It seems to have been removed in the last week or 2.

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.

With Facebook, you can use a pseudonym for your vanity URL and hide all content to be non-visible to all except those you grant access to. This works well, I feel, and hope g+ does the same.

It's so spammers don't use it to get a bunch of @gmail addresses to spam (with personal info to boot!).

And how would they discover the gplus vanity urls? From the email addresses?

Browsing/crawling around G+? There's not @facebook email, so it doesn't matter if everyone can find your vanity URL.

It would be quite easy to get started, http://findpeopleonplus.com/ already has a million places to begin.

> There's not @facebook email

Yes there is.

It's not quite the same, but there is http://gplus.to/ - though you have to add yourself to it.

if you knew the URL... you wouldn't need search ;)

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.

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."

They reason they are doing this instead of just using goo.gl is g.co will only go to Google products. Anyone can create a goo.gl link and potentially send you to a phishing site.

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.

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

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.

"Google says it will use the domain in order to create a shortcut for all its products and services using the format g.co/[XYZproduct/service] and that the domain will be live sometime later in the afternoon today." http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/18/google-buys-g-co-to-create-...

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)

I heard 1.5 million.

> 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?

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.

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