Hacker News Reader

Comment by bdn_ | Hacker News Reader

At one point of time, `http://to` resolved to a "It works!" page [1]. I've always thought it would be cool to have a URL shortener with links such as `https://to/library` or something similar. Oh, how much fun running your own TLD would be...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150319211308/http://to/

View on HN

At Google and many other tech companies, internal machines are configured to have go/<whatever> work just like you describe. Looks like someone even made a whole company around it

https://www.golinks.com/blog/go-links-history/

They had this at Chase when I worked there. As I recall discoverability was a problem though.

A problem with this approach is browsers love to resolve it to http://go.com, so Disney may be getting a feed of what Googlers are interested in.

I mean, have fun? You're gonna get most stuff like go/thor-design or go/zanzibar. It's not as if go links are go/our-disney+-competitor.

I have found Chrome more willing to resolve go/foo as a web search. As a result, the Google autocomplete suggestions for terms like "go/m" are pretty amusing

Interestingly there are also several go/foo autocompletions on Duckduckgo :)

I can’t speak for anywhere else, but I’m pretty sure Google uses a Proxy Auto Config script for go links, which should prevent that from happening in most cases.

Disclosure: I work for Google.

Same for Target

I've never seen a configuration that would set a default subdomain search on .com., so I find this hard to believe. Can you show me a browser that resolves like this?

Somewhat related - Microsoft bought corp.com as back in the Windows 2000 days, "corp" was the default/example domain in AD - https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/04/microsoft-buys-corp-com-...

Not just go, but lots of our internal stuff can be resolved that way. m/ c/ etc. you can get this for yourself by setting search domains.

Intel had that when I worked there

They still do; it's goto/ though

I was just there a few years ago, now it’s goto/ instead of go/. Maybe go/ still works, I never thought to check.

I had worked at a bank as an IT professional and it works wonders, until the browser tries to be smart and attempts a Google search

It was a link shortener for a while! I used to use it.

It appears to have been archived in Japanese, but: https://web.archive.org/web/20120103092225/http://to/

I wrote myself a Chrome extension that does this, using http://l/foo style links, and using Chrome's sync to share across devices. Works well enough but limited to desktops.

Some large orgs maintain internal shorteners, like http://go links at Google.

What's the name of your extension? I've been using https://www.trot.to/go-links for this and it's nice to know I could scale it out to my company if I wanted, but I'd prefer something that didn't depend on a service for my personal usage.

Using DHCP to send a DNS search path can make this work across a lan, which is how it works in most work environments.

If you set your dns search path to example.com then http://go would resolve to go.example.com which could be your link shortner.

I recall seeing go link stickers around Google's Mountain View campus in the early 2010s! That was the first time I had seen something done like that, "overriding" an entire TLD zone (not that `.go` is in use, anyway) to serve custom content.

Do you happen to know how Google, or any other places, do this? I assume a custom DNS resolver being forced on clients through a network could do this, or maybe hosts files for each machine.

You don't need to override a top-level domain. If you have the company DNS specify a search domain of the company owned website, you can just have the "go.<company-website>" available on the internal DNS. whenever someone enters go/whatever into a webbrowser, it will then resolve "go" into that internal "go.<whatever>" server.

It's important to note that http://go/ and http://go./ are different things. The former means "consult my search path", the latter means "lookup the apex record of the go TLD". When you write "example.com", you really mean "example.com.", for example. Someone decided that browsers should save you a byte, and now every URL is ambiguous, causing all sorts of problems. (For example, if your search path is "corp.company.com" and you type "example.com" into your URL bar, you should be taken to "example.com.corp.company.com" before trying "example.com", but that turns out not to be what anyone wants, so you're pretty much screwed if you DO want that behavior. As always, the core of the Internet is duct tape and chewing gum.)

This often bites people when they wonder why they blow up their DNS servers with traffic from services that contact addresses like "foo.default". With a search path of "search default.svc.cluster.local svc.cluster.local cluster.local" in resolv.conf, the app is actually looking up foo.default, foo.default.default.svc.cluster.local, foo.default.cluster.local, and foo.default.svc.cluster.local, etc. every single time. Hard-code "foo.default.svc.cluster.local." in the app config, and you eliminate requests for the names that can't possibly exist, and save the load (and latency) of handling them.

I bought the punycode domain {emoji_rabbit}.to (i.e. "hop to") intending to build a url shortner. But I never did anything with it and let it expire. And now it doesn't seem like .to even lets you buy emoji domains anymore. I kind of wish I had held on to it.

I can confirm that emoji domains for `.to` are still supported, I believe most of them are taken by now, though. You can use https://register.to to check.

Huh, looks like you're right. I distinctly remember getting an error for emoji domains but not normal ones. I might have made an incorrect assumption from that. Either way I've accepted I'm never getting that domain back.

Many years ago, there used to be http://www.tk/. They would let you register free domains (which I think technically were actually subdomains, but I'm really not sure). You could point these to anywhere online and it would maintain your [whatever].tk URL in the address bar. I remember hosting some pages on Geocities and using .tk to make it look "authentic" since it appeared to be self-hosted, which was 1337.

It seems that the service now redirects to a site called Freenom where you can still get .tk names, but they appear to be priced based on the length and whether or not the domain contains known words or phrases (though some free ones are apparently still available if you don't mind having a gibberish name)

> which I think technically were actually subdomains, but I'm really not sure

IIRC, anything that isn’t the TLD is a subdomain. It’s just that we typically think of a subdomain as starting at the third-level. So, for this site, news is the subdomain of ycombinator.com, but also, ycombinator is a subdomain of com.

> It seems that the service now redirects to a site called Freenom where you can still get .tk names, but they appear to be priced based on the length and whether or not the domain contains known words or phrases (though some free ones are apparently still available if you don't mind having a gibberish name)

I consider that virtuous, and smart. Short domains must cost more than long domains. They're more valuable. Words must cost more than gibberish. But there were domains available, right? Didn't have to bang out twenty minutes finding something you liked that wasn't taken?

Freenom used to give these out for free as well (along with everything else in the “High Value” section). I had some that I used to play with, but I haven't checked if I can keep renewing for free.

Ahh the good old .tk domain It could bypass URL filters on online games such as Runescape, giving scammers endless victims

I have run custom TLDs at home for many years. Not sure I would call it "fun" but it does put into perspective "ICANN" and the "domain name business".

People who discuss the internet publicly generally assume that a TLD implies renting out large numbers of domains to the public. IMO, that is only one potential use.

At a previous employer, we used an internal link shortener that went like http://go/whatever. Very user friendly.

Say Google without saying Google. These URLs sometimes leak into the public internet, and there's especially lots of them in AOSP and Chromium code.

Google is not the only company doing this, though ex-googlers may have spread it around initially.

Yep, `ping to` was so funny to type. `ping ai` works, just as terse and almoste as easy to remember, but a bit less funny to my mind.

unfortunately, it seems like ICANN rules prevent this for new gTLDs

Reply on news.ycombinator.com