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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

More "Go"ogle culture out in the wild.

I've seen these at a few companies now. I'm a little surprised they're still called "go"-links, though I suppose the name works everywhere.

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Huh. This is a thing I've seen at a few companies now and never seen reference to them coming out of Google. It makes sense, but it's also completely standalone - "go to the page."

A couple of the startups that do go links have blog posts on the history:

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

https://www.trot.to/blog/2020/07/09/go-links-origin-story

Those 2 stories kind of contradict each other. One says Benjamin Staffin invented golinks, then later another Googler built golinks in 2006. The other says Benjamin Staffin created golinks around 2009/2010.

Original author of https://github.com/trotto/go-links here! We spoke with Benjamin directly, so I trust his recollection.

It was one of the most popular “mini-services” at google along side less useful things like percent/ (which shows your tenure percentile), memegen and bunch of others, maintained by like a single engineer on the side. These were (at least to me) what was so great about Google’s early engineer-driven culture. It was like the early web app age in a sense…

Especially because Golink seems to be (at least partially) written in Go

Pretty sure orignal google’s golinks predates Go the language by many years

I implemented this for my personal use and chose “aka/“ instead of “go/“. Still short, and still pretty self explanatory, but unique.

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