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Didnt they just use the link shortener to compress the url? They used their url as the "database" (ie holding the compiler state).

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They didn't store anything themselves since they encoded the full state in the urls that were given out. So the link shortener was the only place where the "database", the urls, were being stored.

Yeah but the purpose of the url shortener was not to store the data, it was to shorten the url. The fact that the data was persisted on google's sever somewhere is incidental.

In other words, every shortened url is "using the url shortener as a database" in that sense. Taking a url with a long query parameter and using a url shortener to shorten it does not constitute "abusing a link shortener as a database."

Except in this case the url IS the data, so storing the url is the same as storing the data.

Its incidental. The state is in the url which is only shortened because its so long. Google’s url shortener is not needed to store the data.

It’s simply a normal use-case for a url shortener. A long url, usually because of some very large query parameter, which gets mapped to a short one.

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