Countless books with irrevocably broken references - https://www.google.com/search?q=%22://goo.gl%22&sca_upv=1&sc...
And for what? The cost of keeping a few TB online and a little bit of CPU power?
An absolute act of cultural vandalism.
https://tracker.archiveteam.org/goo-gl/ (1.66B work items remaining as of this comment)
How to run an ArchiveTeam warrior: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior
(edit: i see jaydenmilne commented about this further down thread, mea culpa)
I wanted to help and did that using VMware.
For curious people, here is what the UI looks like, you have a list of projects to choose, I choose the goo.gl project, and a "Current project" tab which shows the project activity.
Project list: https://imgur.com/a/peTVzyw
Current project: https://imgur.com/a/QVuWWIj
Going to run the warrior over the weekend to help out a bit.
It wasn't a good idea to use shortened links in a citation in the first place, and somebody should have explained that to the authors. They didn't publish a book or write an academic paper in a vacuum - somebody around them should have known better and said something.
And really it's not much different than anything else online - it can disappear on a whim. How many of those shortened links even go to valid pages any more?
And no company is going to maintain a "free" service forever. It's easy to say, "It's only ...", but you're not the one doing the work or paying for it.
I know some brilliant people, but, well, putting it kindly, they're as useful as a chocolate teapot outside of their specific area of academic expertise.
The authors just had their heads too far up their academic asses to have heard of this.
If you want it archived do it. You seem to want someone else to take up your concerns.
An HN genius should be able to crawl this and fix it.
But you’re not geniuses. They’re too busy to be low affect whiners on social media.
Who's lost out at the end of the day? People who didn't understand the free market and lost access to these "free" services? Or people who knew what would happen and avoided them? My links are still working...
There are digital public goods (like Wikipedia) that are intended to stick around forever with free access, but Google isn't one of them.
It's a great idea, and today in 2025, papers are pretty much the only place where using these shortened URLs makes a lot of sense. In almost any other context you could just use a QR code or something, but that wouldn't fit an academic paper.
Their specific choice of shortened URL provider was obviously unfortunate. The real failure is that of DOI to provide an alternative to goo.gl or tinyurl or whatever that is easy to reach for. It's a big failure, since preserving references to things like academic papers is part of their stated purpose.
???
DOI and ORCID sponsored link-shortening with Goo.gl. Authors did what they were told would be optimal, and ORCID was probably told by Google that it'd hone its link-shortening service for long-term reliability. What a crazy victim-blame.
Even worse if your resource is a shortened link by some other service, you've just added yet another layer of unreliable indirection.
Just buy any scientific book and try to navigate to it's own errata they link in the book. It's always dead.
It's the fact that it's likely gonna be printed in a paper journal, where you can't click the link.
This use case of "I have a paper journal and no PDF but a computer with a web browser" seems extraordinarily contrived. I have literally held a single-digit number of printed papers in my entire life while looking at thousands as PDFs. If we cared, we'd use a QR code.
This kind of luddite behavior sometimes makes using this site exhausting.
Anyone who is savvy enough to put a link in a document is well-aware of the fact that links don't work forever, because anyone who has ever clicked a link from a document has encountered a dead link. It's not 2005 anymore, the internet has accumulated plenty of dead links.
This is by no means a universal experience.
People still get printed journals. Libraries still stock them. Some folks print out reference materials from a PDF to take to class or a meeting or whatnot.
Sure, contributing to link rot is bad, but in the same way that throwing out spoiled food is bad. Sometimes you've just gotta break a bunch of links.
That probably depends on the link's purpose.
"The full dataset and source code to reproduce this research can be downloaded at <url>" might be deeply interesting to someone in a few years.
In any case a paper should not rely on an ephemeral resource like internet links.
Have you ever tried to navigate to the errata corrige of computer science books? It's one single book, with one single link, and it's dead anyway.
There are always dependencies in citations. Unless a paper comes with its citations embedded, splitting hairs between why one untrustworthy provider is more untrustworthy than another is silly.
Reading paper was more comfortable then reading on the screen, and it was easy to annotate, highlight, scribble notes in the margin, doodle diagrams, etc.
Do grad students today just use tablets with a stylus instead (iPad + pencil, Remarkable Pro, etc)?
Granted, post grad school I don't print much anymore, but that's mostly due to a change in use case. At work I generally read at most 1-5 papers a day tops, which is small enough to just do on a computer screen (and have less need to annotate, etc). Quite different then the 50-100 papers/week + deep analysis expected in academia.
I just had a really warm feeling of nostalgia reading that! I was a pretty average student, and the material was sometimes dull, but the coffee was nice, life had little stress (in comparison) and everything felt good. I forgot about those times haha. Thanks!
We have many paper documents from over 1,000 years ago.
The vast majority of what was on the internet 25 years ago is gone forever.
Try going back by 6/7 years on this very website, half the links are dead.
I’m genuinely asking. It seems like its hard to trust that any service will remaining running for decades
It is built for the task, and assuming worse case scenario of sunset, it would be ingested into the Wayback Machine. Note that both the Internet Archive and Cloudflare are supporting partners (bottom of page).
(https://doi.org/ is also an option, but not as accessible to a casual user; the DOI Foundation pointed me to https://www.crossref.org/ for adhoc DOI registration, although I have not had time to research further)
other readers may be specifically interested in their contingency plan
This is distinct from Google saying "bye y'all, no more GETs for you" with no other way to access the data.
That’s not to say that DOIs aren’t registered for all kinds of urls. I found the likes of YouTube etc when I researched this about 10 years ago.
Crossref isn’t the only DOI registration agency. DataCite may be more relevant, although both require membership. Part of this is the commitment to maintaining the content.
You could look at Figshare or Zenodo? https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/archiving-a-github-r...
Then Rogue Scholar is worth a mention. https://rogue-scholar.org/
Sorry that doesn’t answer your question but maybe that’s a clue that DOIs might not be right for your use case?
Until the Cocos Islands are annexed by Australia.
You aren't responsible if things go offline. No more than if a publisher stops reprinting books and the library copies all get eaten by rats.
A reader can assess the URl for trustworthiness (is it scam.biz or legitimate_news.com) look at the path to hazard a guess at the metadata and contents, and - finally - look it up in an archive.
I thought that was the standard in academia? I've had reviewers chastise me when I did not use wayback machine to archive a citation and link to that since listing a "date retrieved" doesn't do jack if there's no IA copy.
Short links were usually in addition to full URLS, and more in conference presentations than the papers themselves.
We’ve learned over the years that they can be unreliable, security risks, etc.
I just don’t see a major use-case for them anymore.
Say the interview of a person, a niche publication, a local pamphlet?
Maybe to certify that your article is of a certain level of credibility you need to manually preserve all the cited works yourself in an approved way.
The simplicity of the web is one of its virtues but also leaves a lot on the table.
Overcast link to relevant chapter: https://overcast.fm/+BOOFexNLJ8/02:33
Original episode link: https://shows.arrowloop.com/@abstractions/episodes/001-the-r...
For the immeasurable benefits of educating the public.
It makes me mad also, but something we have to learn the hard way is that nothing in this world is permanent. Never, ever depend on any technology to persist. Not even URLs to original hosts should be required. Inline everything.