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."
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.
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…