Also helps that they are in a culture which does not mind killing services on a whim.
I doubt it was a cost-driven decision on the basis of running the servers. My guess would be that it was a security and maintenance burden that nobody wanted.
They also might have wanted to use the domain for something else.
The nature of something like this is that the cost to run it naturally goes down over time. Old links get clicked less so the hardware costs would be basically nothing.
As for the actual software security, it's a URL shortener. They could rewrite the entire thing in almost no time with just a single dev. Especially since it's strictly hosting static links at this point.
It probably took them more time and money to find inactive links than it'd take to keep the entire thing running for a couple of years.
How? Barring a database leak I don't see a way for someone to simply scan all the links. Putting something like Cloudflare in front of the shortener with a rate limit would prevent brute force scanning. I assume google semi-competently made the shortener (using a random number generator) which would make it pretty hard to find links in the first place.
Removing inactive links also doesn't solve this problem. You can still have active links to secret docs.
If they're have a (passwordless) URL they're not secret.
Back when it was made, shorteners were competing to see who could make the shortest URL, so I bet a brute force scan would find everything.
My understanding from conversations I've seen about Google Reader is that the problem with Google is that every few years they have a new wave of infrastructure, which necessitates upgrading a bunch of things about all of their products.
I guess that might be things like some new version of BigTable or whatever coming along, so you need to migrate everything from the previous versions.
If a product has an active team maintaining it they can handle the upgrade. If a product has no team assigned there's nobody to do that work.
Arrival of new does not neccessitate migration.
Only departure of old does.
But it's worse than that because they'll bring up whole new datacenters without ever bringing the deprecated service up, and they also retire datacenters with some regularity. So if you run a service that depends on deprecated services you could quickly find yourself in a situation where you have to migrate to maintain N+2 redundancy but there's hardly any datacenter with capacity available in the deprecated service you depend on.
Also, how many man years of engineering do you want to spend on keeping goo.gl running. If you were an engineer would you want to be assigned this project? What are you going to put in your perf packet? "Spent 6 months of my time and also bothered engineers in other teams to keep this service that makes us no money running"?
If you're high flying, trying to be the next Urs or Jeff Dean or Ian Goodfellow, you wouldn't, but I'm sure there's are many thousands of people who are able to do the job that would just love to work for Google and collect a paycheck on a $150k/yr job and do that for the rest of their lives.
1. A senior Google leader telling the shareholders "we've asked 1% of our engineers, that's 270 people, costing $80M/year, to work on services that produce no revenue whatsoever." I don't think it would pass that well.
2. A Google middle manager trying to figure out if an engineer working exclusively on non-revenue projects is actually being useful or otherwise; this is made more complex by about 30% of the workforce trying to go for the rest and vest option provided by these projects.
The business case for this is that Google lose a bunch of money in b2b (cloud mostly, potentially AI in future) because professional users (developers etc) don't believe that products will be supported. Every time Google shut down a service like this, this perception is re-inforced. We're investing this money into these services to change our brand perception and help us make more money in future.
As a bonus, this kind of cultural change would also force them to rebuild their engineering systems (and promotional systems) to make this easier. This may not have mattered for Search/Ads but it will matter if they actually care about winning in cloud and AI.
The manager in the trenches can tell if there's actual work happening, to move goo.gl from the internal legacy system to the new supported one doesn't magically happen, code needs to change for it to work after the old system gets shut off.
Best analogy I can think of is log-rolling (as in the lumberjack competition).
What does happen is APIs are constantly upgraded and rewritten and deprecated. Eventually projects using the deprecated APIs need to be upgraded or dropped. I don't really understand why developers LOVE to deprecate shit that has users but it's a fact of life.
Second hand info about Google only so take it with a grain of salt.
As such, developing a new API gets more brownie points than rebuilding a service that does a better job of providing an existing API.
To be more charitable, having learned lessons from an existing API, a new one might incorporate those lessons learned and be able to do a better job serving various needs. At some point, it stops making sense to support older versions of an API as multiple versions with multiple sets of documentation can be really confusing.
I'm personally cynical enough to believe more in the less charitable version, but it's not impossible.
This seems like a good eval case for autonomous coding agents.
You know how Google deprecating stuff externally is a (deserved) meme? Things get deprecated internally even more frequently and someone has to migrate to the new thing. It's a huge pain in the ass to keep up with for teams that are fully funded. If something doesn't have a team dedicated to it eventually someone will decide it's no longer worth that burden and shut it down instead.
Edit: nevermind, I had no idea Dynamic Links is deprecated and will be shutting down.
It's a really ridiculous decision though. There's not a lot that goes into a link redirection service.
Yeah I can't imagine it being a huge cost saver? But guessing that the people who developed it long moved on, and it stopped being a cool project. And depending on the culture inside Google it just doesn't pay career-wise to maintain someone else's project.
Cloudflare offered to run it and Google turned them down:
Here is a service that basically makes Google $0 and confuses a non-zero amount of non-technical users when it sends them to a scam website.
Also, in the age of OCR on every device they make basically no sense. You can take a picture of a long URL on a piece of paper then just copy and paste the text instantly. The URL shortener no longer serves a discernible purpose.
It's a strange thing to consider 'since 2018' "a long time". Only in tech circles is this so, not in normal life.
That way they'll make money, and they can fund the service not having to shut down, and there isn't any linkrot.
Given those options, an ad seems like a trivial annoyance to anyone who very much needs a very old link to work. Anyone who still has the ability to update their pages can always update their links.
"Here's a permanent (*) link".
[*] Definitions of permanent may vary wildly.
I will be honest I was never in an environment that would benefit from link shortening, so I don't really know if any end users actually wanted them (my guess twitter mainly) and always viewed these hashed links with extreme suspicion.
While I generally find the "killed by Google" thing insanely short-sighted, this borders on straight-up negligence.
Then they should also be okay for keeping the goo.gl links honestly.
Sounds kinda bad for some good will but this is literally google, the one thing google is notorious for is killing their products.
Hey lets also dump 100 Billion dollars into this AI thing without any business plan or ideas to back it up this year. HOW FAST CAN YOU ACCEPT MY CHECK!
For company running GCP and giving things like Colab TPUs free the costs of running a URL service would be trivial rounding number at best
I've handled far more traffic on single machines 20 years ago.
Like other things spun down there must not be value in the links.