From a security perspective, this is a good idea. People intuitively trust Google links. URL shorteners hide what you're clicking on. Sometimes even informed people click on links.
I remember a war between Users and IT - the shitty CMS everybody used had a crazy-small limit for links, so people wanted to use URL shorteners, which then got blocked for security reasons ...
I have seen linked.in shared as if its job posts shared on LinkedIn, then they redirect to some other url. A job seeker usually has to visit another url to apply to a job posted in LinkedIn, so its not completely suspicious.
Do non-technical people think of `goo.gl` as Google?
Yes. And non-technical people don’t know that goo.gl is a URL. Only that it looks like the word Google and Google is official, so this is fine.
Well if it's someone that would be fooled by google-site.com then you don't really help them by shutting down goo.gl in particular.
in a sense having goo.gl be legitimate only serves to legitimize google-site.com
additionally we should tar and feather whoever came up with akams