Google Unveils goo.gl URL Shortening Service

eldavojohn writes "The Sultan of Search is unveiling a new service (currently only available for Google Toolbar and Feedburner) that will tackle a very old problem usually solved by bit.ly or tinyurl — URL shortening. Now, we've heard cries for sanity to prevent potential issues (like what if tr.im had shut down and broken millions of links?) but with one of the goliaths of the industry jumping in the ring it looks like URL shortening is here to stay. And a quick note for people who enjoy privacy, goo.gl explicitly states: 'Please note that Google may choose to publicly display aggregate and non-personally identifiable statistics about particular shortened links, such as the number of end user clicks.' You didn't think Google was going to sit back and let bit.ly harvest juicy data on 2.1 billion links that were clicked in November without trying to corner some of that action to make their ad suggestions more accurate, did you?" Google's shortening service is called Goo.gl.

Comments

What do you mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

Animal or vegetal shortening?

Re:What do you mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

Animal [...] shortening

I don't know about y'all, but 'round these parts we call that "lard."

Re:What do you mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

@AnonymousCoward - #lard is from pig, could also be beef, horse, duck, etc.

Other services work fine

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

I, for one, will be avoiding this. Existing services work fine and this is one more way Google is headed towards info omniscience.

Re:Other services work fine

[Bottles]

i 4 1 wl b avoiding ths. XStng sRvcs wRk fine & this is 1 mr way goo.gl headed 2wrds Nfo omnisns

There! Shortened that for you!

Re:Other services work fine

[flowsnake]

Indeed. I'm not giving up my SoCuteUrl; the links come out a bit longer, but oh so lovely! For example, who would not prefer http://www.socuteurl.com/coozzypumpkins over http://www.ExpertSexChange.com?

Re:Other services work fine

[vandit2k6]

Hahaha that's awesome, you should open a new string shortening service :)

Re:Other services work fine

[Anonymous Coward]

/suicide

Re:Other services work fine

[Shikaku]

YRUNAHRY?

Re:Other services work fine

[agentgonzo]

Why run a hairy what?

Re:Other services work fine

[Coren22]

I read that as urinary, was wondering why spell it that way when the regular way is shorter.

Re:Other services work fine

[s1id3r0]

Although I can't disagree with your thesis, as I see the same trend, the question that I think we need to ask is how much of a concern it really is. I am far more concerned about Microsoft dominating the market in the same manner. I am happy to see Google put major pressure on Microsoft as they come out with and link multiple projects into a "one stop domain". Personally I support open software, and I am happy to see Google growing the open source model ever further with each new product or feature. I disagree with Google controlling so much of the market, but they do it so well that I can't really be as upset with them as their dominance may warrant. It is a convince to have all the tools coming from a company that you can count on. Google does so much that just the fact that they keep it all as together as they do is nothing short of a miracle in and of itself.

Re:Other services work fine

[omarius]

"Coozy Pumpkins" sounds a hell of a lot worse to me... If that's a euphemism for anything I don't want to know.

Re:Other services work fine

[m1xram]

Any of these services has the potential to provide tracking on your usage of the web if they really catch on. Sometimes a bit of paranoia isn't a bad thing.

Re:Other services work fine

[Starayo]

One of my own sites came up as "tinywiddlebums". I think I'll use a URL shortener that won't get me arrested.

Re:Other services work fine

[Sulphur]

Is it a new way to claim first post?

Re:Other services work fine

[Anonymous Coward]

DIE

Re:Other services work fine

[thetoadwarrior]

That's the nice thing about freedom of choice. You can use the ones you would like to use. I for one will probably use it just for the sole reason Google won't go out of business anytime soon and I don't use url shortening for anything questionable so I don't care if they know. The only group I'd really be concerned with snooping at my data is the government and they can get that data from any one of those services.

Re:Other services work fine

[at_slashdot]

In a way is better to have one company I trust know all about my digital life than spread out that info to more companies.

Re:Other services work fine

[johntkucz]

I like the same old uniform resource locater system.

Re:Other services work fine

[maxwell demon]

That's the nice thing about freedom of choice. You can use the ones you would like to use.

That's only half-true: As creator of the shortened link you have the choice. However, as the user of that link you only have two options: Use the service the creator has chosen, or simply don't follow the link.

Well, maybe it would be a good idea to create "shortener proxies" which you could use for URL shortening services. You'd direct your browser to use that proxy for any shortening site (e.g. with the help of FoxyProxy, or with a dedicated extension for shortening service proxies), and that proxy would then access the real shortening service, while removing any data from your request which is not needed for getting the true URL (note that it wouldn't affect the data sent to the ultimate destination, because that access wouldn't go through the proxy). Since the proxy itself wouldn't need access to the URL data base, any number of providers could set up their own proxies. You could even decide to randomly chose a different one every time (that would probably need a dedicated extension, though). The shortening service would only know which URL was accessed and which proxy was used to access the URL, and nothing else.

Re:Other services work fine

[TheLink]

> Any of these services has the potential to provide tracking on your usage of the web if they really catch on. Sometimes a bit of paranoia isn't a bad thing.

Does goo.gl have a "preview" setting?

tinyurl allows you to set a cookie so that you don't get redirected to the long url. You actually get to see the long url first.

This sort of thing would also allow the service to track you. So there are various tradeoffs involved.

Re:Other services work fine

[sexconker]

YRUNAHRY?

I am in a hurry because I NTGM?

Re:Other services work fine

[TheRaven64]

What? It's better to have once company collect everything about you and sell that than it is to have the information scattered amongst a lot of different providers making it difficult to collect together? I think you need to provide a bit more explanation of why you think that before you deserve that insightful mod that you seem to have acquired...

Re:Other services work fine

[Ihmhi]

string shortening service

You could call it scisso.rs! (And yes, .rs is a real TLD.)

Re:Other services work fine

[mobby_6kl]

Cute URLs suck balls. There's only one acceptable URL service, and it changes the totally lame http://www.expertsexchange.com/ into a much more awesome www.freakinghugeurl.com/refer.php?count=4&url=VjFaV2IxVXdNVWhVYTFacFRURndUbFJVU2xKb GJIQkpZWHBHYVZJeFdrcFZWekUwWVcxS2MxTnFXbGhpU jJoMldWY3hS MU5HU25WV2JVWk9Za1paZUZZeFVrcE9WMUpHWlVST1VWWkVRVGs9

Re:Other services work fine

[ShakaUVM]

>>I, for one, will be avoiding this. Existing services work fine and this is one more way Google is headed towards info omniscience.

If a friend emails a Google shortened URL to you, you'll avoid clicking on it?

BUT HOW WILL YOU KNOW IF IT'S A RICKROLL OR GOATSE LINK?

The not-knowing will drive you slowly insane.

Re:Other services work fine

[Thinboy00]

This one's better.

Re:Other services work fine

[Thinboy00]

They don't need you to preview in order to track you. 3xx redirection + cookie setting works just fine.

Re:Other services work fine

[Paua Fritter]

My favourite is urlshorteningservicefortwitter.com

Re:Other services work fine

[Anonymous Coward]

In theory, yes. But why should you trust any company. If you can't trust any company, then it is better to spread the info out to hinder its aggregation.

You guys missed one tiny, important detail...

[Yvan256]

"Google URL Shortener is currently available for Google products and not for broader consumer use."

Re:You guys missed one tiny, important detail...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Google URL Shortener is currently available for Google products and not for broader consumer use."

That would be in the first sentence of the summary (don't worry, it's only natural not to RTFS):

(currently only available for Google Toolbar and Feedburner)

Re:You guys missed one tiny, important detail...

[Yvan256]

See? I can also miss one tiny, important detail!

Oh crap, I hope I don't start writing for Slashdot...

Re:You guys missed one tiny, important detail...

[OzPeter]

See? I can also miss one tiny, important detail!

Oh crap, I hope I don't start writing for Slashdot...

Sorry .. too late .. the employment offer has already been sent out

Re:You guys missed one tiny, important detail...

[smallfries]

Hang on. He only proved that he can't read, we need proof that he can't write either before Slashdot hires him..

Re:You guys missed one tiny, important detail...

[OzPeter]

Hang on. He only proved that he can't read, we need proof that he can't write either before Slashdot hires him..

Well the offer is only for a junior position, so he can't be expected to both not be able to read and not be able to write. Just one of those skills is a requirement for this entry level position. However with the excellent in-house training available at Slashdot, I'm sure his writing skills will start to degrade in mere weeks - if not days

Re:You guys missed one tiny, important detail...

[Shikaku]

You are replying to yourself to read the first sentence...

Draw your own conclusions Slashdotters.

Re:You guys missed one tiny, important detail...

[Yvan256]

Is is that I can't read? Because the parent really didn't read the first sentence!

Re:You guys missed one tiny, important detail...

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like someone just found out they have split personalities.

Re:You guys missed one tiny, important detail...

[GargamelSpaceman]

This is what allows it ( maybe ) to jive with google's 'Do no evil' motto. Since the scope is limited to google products, then it doesn't break the web at large. Without google there are no google products anyway, so who cares if they are full of shortened URLs. URL shortening is, in general, evil.

Re:You guys missed one tiny, important detail...

[Richard_at_work]

Why is URL shortening evil, but the DNS system not? Its not as if any URL has to be descriptive of the content you will be viewing...

Re:You guys missed one tiny, important detail...

[KevinKnSC]

Don't worry, as long as you don't post the exact same comment tomorrow you should be fine.

Re:You guys missed one tiny, important detail...

[koxkoxkox]

So you really are reading not only the posts, but also the name of the posters. Wow, you do have a lot of time to lose !

Re:You guys missed one tiny, important detail...

[Shikaku]

No, my code's compiling.

Re:You guys missed one tiny, important detail...

[GargamelSpaceman]

URLs are supposed to be usable in links. Extra indirection without caching introduces more opportunities for a link to break. Also, url shortening hides information that is useful, for instance, the domain name. Are you going to follow a link to urlshorten.com from slashdot at work? How do you know it doesn't really lead to goatse or nambla.org org or whatever? And linking through somewhere else gives that somewhere else an opportunity to do annoying things like frame the content etc. It has the potential to give the shortening site the means to hold millions of links hostage. If you want to use the link, you have to first view an ad, or whatever. Fsck that! Don't give these people the value of your intellectual property by using their 'shortening service'. Your opinion that a site is worth linking to can be published so that nobody can collect a toll from it if you just use the real url. There may be some value in mirroring however, and linking to mirrors, but url shorteners don't do that.

Re:You guys missed one tiny, important detail...

[maxwell demon]

Because you have the choice whom you let resolve the domains for you. You don't have the choice whom you let resolve the shortened url for you..If shortened URLs were distributed like domain names, there would be no problem.

Re:You guys missed one tiny, important detail...

[Anonymous Coward]

But consider this, if you will.

If Google died right now, instantly everything gone, what do you think will happen?
Not a lot of people would be caring that tinyurl.com/37867572 (not sure if real, made it up) isn't working, they'd be more worried at OH MY GOD GOOGLE IS GONE, WHERE WILL I FIND MY PORN
Then at exactly 1 day and a half later, more than half the internet users would collectively kill themselves by headbutting the screen.

If there is any company who could pull off a URL shortener, Google is one of the few.
The chance of them vanishing any time soon is unlikely.

As long as previewing was enabled by default if no cookie was set, i would gladly accept it in to my home, cook it some dinner and give it a nice backrub.

Why?

[Yvan256]

Aside from twitter and SMS which both have self-imposed limits, what's the point of these things?!

Re:Why?

[wertarbyte]

I agree. I also use a perl script to expand tinyurls to their full form in IRC and IM logfiles. Why introduce another (possibly weak) link into the, well, link chain?

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's your answer: http://bit.ly/4kb77v

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Aside from twitter and SMS which both have self-imposed limits, what's the point of these things?!

A demonstration is in order!

Check out this awesome new site I found! http://thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameatlonglast.com

Versus

Check out this awesome new site I found! http://bit.ly/PFfFp

In fact, that first url will not let me post because it says "Filter error: That's an awful long string of letters there." So there's a good reason!

Re:Why?

[SpeedyDX]

You seem to ask an awfully odd question, sir. Those purposes (and other related purposes, such as Facebook status updates, etc.) are precisely the main point of these services!

"Aside from watching TV and playing video games, what's the point of a TV?!?"

"Aside from being able to read many books without having to physically carry them all around, what's the point of the Nook?!?!!??"

Re:Why?

[Tezcat]

I've often seen newspaper articles printing a tinyurl (or similar) link rather than linking to obscure, very long web addresses.
It's a hell of a lot easier to type in a short series of numbers and letters than to accurately enter something like: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8400962.stm

Re:Why?

[Sockatume]

Ones like TinyURL, that let you specify a not-yet-used address, can be handy for making memorable links: http://tinyurl.com/whytinyurl

Re:Why?

[OzPeter]

Here's your answer: http://bit.ly/4kb77v

Bastard!

Re:Why?

[Malc]

I find them highly irritating because they do hide the real URL. I'd much rather have multiple copy and pastes with a long URL that has been broken across multiple lines. Since moving from text only email and giving up on the spamfest Usenet though, I can't say long URLs have really been much of a problem for me.

Re:Why?

[IBBoard]

Ditto for Linux Format in the UK. Some of the projects have nice short URLs (e.g. something.sourceforge.net) but others have horribly long ones that people would have to re-type, possibly introducing errors.

Still, I avoid URL shortening wherever possible in Twitter and just work with the URL I've got and the characters that remain. ChromeMUSE is useful for un-shortening links as well :)

Re:Why?

[Tim C]

They're a lot easier to read out over the phone, for one - especially if you're deep linking into a site. Seen the URL that points to this article, for instance?

Re:Why?

[bickerdyke]

Oh I can tell you what the difference is!

The point of a TV is watching TV and video games. And thats what a usual TV-Set does perfectly well!

And if the point of facebook status and twitter is to promote links, and you can't do that without some vulnerable external service, the the whole concept of that is f**ing broken!!

Considering this, let me cortrect your analogies:

"Aside from watching TV and playing video games, what's the point of a TV with a screen painted black?!?"
"Aside from being able to read many books without having to physically carry them all around, what's the point of an umbrella?!?!!??"

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out this awesome new site I found! http://thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameatlonglast.com/ [thelongest...nglast.com]

This one I can reasonably assume has something to do with things that are long.

Check out this awesome new site I found! http://bit.ly/PFfFp [bit.ly]

This one could be anything from Rickroll to malware to goatse.

Which one would you rather click on?

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rick rolling is nothing compared to that time someone posted a url to the FBI site on Slashdot.

Url had a GET message confessing to having a hard drive full of CP, and it got modded +5 funny.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

It also acts as a dereferer.

Re:Why?

[Mr. Slippery]

And if the point of facebook status and twitter is to promote links, and you can't do that without some vulnerable external service, the the whole concept of that is f**ing broken!!

The point of microblogging is to broadcast short messages, not merely "to promote links".

Re:Why?

[Yvan256]

Using a shortening service because Slashdot has crappy URLs doesn't fix the root of the problem.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh, I expected at least Goatsex
http://bit.ly/1CWjG5

(and you know you WILL click this, he he he... you just can't stop yourself, can you)

Re:Why?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Using a shortening service because Slashdot has crappy URLs doesn't fix the root of the problem.

Yet it's entirely appropriate since he doesn't control Slashdot nor the myriad sites to which the solution can be generalized.

Even if Slashdot added a 'short URL link' feature for people to read over the phone, most people wouldn't know how to find it - there's no standard mechanism to expose or relate such a thing.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rick rolling is nothing compared to that time someone posted a url to the FBI site on Slashdot.

Url had a GET message confessing to having a hard drive full of CP, and it got modded +5 funny.

Do you have a link to the post?

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not just link to the full video?

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

ass :(

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean http://www.socuteurl.com/oinkypigglecow

Re:Why?

[thetoadwarrior]

How else are you going to send people to goatse or a rickroll?

Re:Why?

[IBBoard]

That's why I'm glad I use ChromeMUSE in Chromium (one of my work-mates pointed me to it). I don't use the shortening part of it, but the lengthening part (which you have to enable) is useful. Being Javascript, I even hacked in this extra little patch (around line 17, just after the "if response is OK") to see the real URLs on the page instead of the Bitly/etc ones :)

if (a.innerText == a.href)
                {
                        a.innerText = msg.url;
                }

I've posted it as a suggestion, so it might be in future versions if the author cares :) /IBBoard curses the "junk characters" filter and proceeds to add filler to the rest of his post

ChromeMUSE is an extension to facilitate the use of URL shortening services. A short URL can be generated for any web page, using the user's preferred shortening service. The short URL is automatically copied to the clipboard to paste into other applications.

ChromeMUSE also automatically expands short URLs on any page, replacing the target URL with the original URL and displays the page title as a tooltip. The URL expansion is provided by LongURL.org, which handles links from more than 200 services.

Features
- Shorten URLs with one-click operation (the shortened URL is automatically copied to clipboard) in Simple Mode.
- Advanced Mode allows choice of service on the fly.
- Supports login credentials (for services like bit.ly and Cligs).
- Scans web pages for short URLs and automatically updates the target URL. The title of the website is displayed as a tooltip when available.
- Supports dynamically updated (AJAX) websites (eg. twitter.com) without having to refresh the page.

Re:Why?

[jmarkantes]

I agree they've become pretty annoying. But, they sound like they're here to stay, and I've found this to be handy: http://www.longurlplease.com/ Firefox extension (and others, I think) that gives you options for these shortened urls. Either expand completely, or in the title attr so you can see it on mouseover, of the href so you can see the full url in the status bar. J

Re:Why?

[truthsearch]

Why type a URL? We all have copy and paste. In all my years on the internet I've never used a URL shortening service or seen the need.

Re:Why?

[IBBoard]

What we need are some microformats that all browsers support. If we make one for "shortened URL", how long do you think it'll take to make it as a feature in IE? :D

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Different solutions exist for sharing a URL (e.g. mu.subsume.com). Much easier to just tell your dad (or whoever) to click a link you already put in his bookmarks than trying to make sure he retypes even a shortened URL correctly.

Re:Why?

[psykocrime]

Why type a URL? We all have copy and paste. In all my years on the internet I've never used a URL shortening service or seen the need.

QFT.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is to count "outgoing" clicks.

Re:Why?

[vegiVamp]

Because sometimes you want to link to something that has more parameters than you can shake a very long stick at. Think of a google maps location url, for one thing.

The world's largest ball of twine is at http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=largest+ball+of+twine&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=35.273162,78.134766&ie=UTF8&hq=largest+ball+of+twine&hnear=&ll=39.524435,-98.43338&spn=0.134265,0.305214&z=12&iwloc=A , but it is now also at http://tinyurl.com/largeballoftwine .

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did a quick google but couldn't find it. Also it might have been CIA.

Re:Why?

[DragonWriter]

Aside from twitter and SMS which both have self-imposed limits, what's the point of these things?!

Getting people to follow links without knowing where they are going.

Re:Why?

[maxwell demon]

Since it's not a link, nothing will happen if you click it. :-)
Unless you use the QuietUrl extension, of course.

Re:Why?

[Tringard]

When Tinyurl was popular there was at least the option to enable a cookie to be sent to tinyurl to get a preview of the link before going on to the real link. These days I just avoid all of these links.

Re:Why?

[maxwell demon]

And if you mis-type, with shortened URLs you are a lot more likely to get to another, completely unrelated, and especially completely unpredictable web site, while mis-typing the true URL will likely give you a simple 404. As an added bonus, the real URL will still be in your address bar, ready to be corrected.

Re:Why?

[maxwell demon]

Just set up a static page on your web server which redirects there, and give that URL. As an added bonus, more people would click http://yourserver.com/greatstuff/funny.html than http://tinyurl.com/randomcharactershere.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a normal link works, YouTube links aren't exactly transparent.

Re:Why?

[bill_mcgonigle]

What we need are some microformats [wikipedia.org] that all browsers support. If we make one for "shortened URL", how long do you think it'll take to make it as a feature in IE? :D

That's a great idea. Microsoft competes when it has to, never before, so I guess how long depends on how useful the feature is. :)

The clever insight here is that most domain names aren't too long for twitter, et. al., it's the query string length.

But should every page on a website have a short version or just when one is requested? The former is wasteful - there are millions of possible pages on Slashdot, for exmaple, maybe billions for each options permutation, but the latter requires a service to be run to request one (and might be hard to do as a microformat).

Re:Why?

[clone53421]

Hmm...

http://bit.ly/4kb77v+#conversations_data

Re:Why?

[mounthood]

Even if Slashdot added a 'short URL link' feature for people to read over the phone, most people wouldn't know how to find it - there's no standard mechanism to expose or relate such a thing.

Wouldn't it be easier to just change all the phones into computers?

Re:Why?

[cababunga]

These days I just avoid all of these links.

Oh, you almost made me believe that there is no Firefox extension to handle this problem. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13140

Re:Why?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Wouldn't it be easier to just change all the phones into computers?

Universal broadband access is a separate story today. :)

Re:Why?

[earlymon]

clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap

Eggggselent.

Re:Why?

[LittleBigScript]

Don't worry if you clicked the link, you are one of the 198,052 who did the same.

To get the metrics on the link just type /info/ between bit.ly and the unique identifier like this http://bit.ly/info/4kb77v

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

there's no standard mechanism to expose or relate such a thing.

they could introduce a meta-tag for that.

oh, wait i guess that was the point of the u.r.l. in the first place...

Re:Why?

[clone53421]

Pff... that’s nothing.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&rls=GGLG%2CGGLG%3A2005-26%2CGGLG%3Aen&q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fsearch%3Fhl%3Den%26lr%3D%26c2coff%3D1%26rls%3DGGLG%252CGGLG%253A2005-26%252CGGLG%253Aen%26q%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.google.com%252Fsearch%253Fhl%253Den%2526lr%253D%2526c2coff%253D1%2526rls%253DGGLG%25252CGGLG%25253A2005-26%25252CGGLG%25253Aen%2526q%253Dhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fwww.google.com%25252Fsearch%25253Fsourceid%25253Dnavclient%252526ie%25253DUTF-8%252526rls%25253DGGLG%25252CGGLG%25253A2005-26%25252CGGLG%25253Aen%252526q%25253Dhttp%2525253A%2525252F%2525252Fwww%2525252Egoogle%2525252Ecom%2525252Fsearch%2525253Fsourceid%2525253Dnavclient%25252526ie%2525253DUTF%2525252D8%25252526rls%2525253DGGLG%2525252CGGLG%2525253A2005%2525252D26%2525252CGGLG%2525253Aen%25252526q%2525253Dhttp%252525253A%252525252F%252525252Fuk2%252525252Emultimap%252525252Ecom%252525252Fmap%252525252Fbrowse%252525252Ecgi%252525253Fclient%252525253Dpublic%2525252526GridE%252525253D%252525252D0%252525252E12640%2525252526GridN%252525253D51%252525252E50860%2525252526lon%252525253D%252525252D0%252525252E12640%2525252526lat%252525253D51%252525252E50860%2525252526search%252525255Fresult%252525253DLondon%25252525252CGreater%252525252520London%2525252526db%252525253Dfreegaz%2525252526cidr%252525255Fclient%252525253Dnone%2525252526lang%252525253D%2525252526place%252525253DLondon%252525252CGreater%252525252BLondon%2525252526pc%252525253D%2525252526advanced%252525253D%2525252526client%252525253Dpublic%2525252526addr2%252525253D%2525252526quicksearch%252525253DLondon%2525252526addr3%252525253D%2525252526scale%252525253D100000%2525252526addr1%252525253D%2526btnG%253DSearch%26btnG%3DSearch&btnG=Search

vs.

http://3.ly/5q2

Re:Why?

[DragonWriter]

They're a lot easier to read out over the phone, for one - especially if you're deep linking into a site.

Why would I want to read a URL over the phone? If I'm communicating a URL to someone for deep linking into a site, then the one thing I can be pretty sure of (since, if I wasn't, I'd have no reason to communicate the URL) is that the person has internet access. Given that, there are a lot better ways of getting them the URL then reading it to them--such as email. Even if I want to use the telephone to notify them, I can just describe what it is, and tell them I'm mailing them the link.

Re:Why?

[IBBoard]

I'd probably be inclined to do it as a selective thing for the important pages but always generate them. From a quick skim of the URLs there isn't much "required" information in there, so a shortened /. URL for your comment could just be "http://slashdot.org/comment/1479074/30446550 (what appears to be "story ID" and "comment ID"). It isn't overly human readable and isn't as short as a most URL shorteners, but then if it was you'd run out of links very quickly, even within a single domain.

Re:Why?

[Ichijo]

Aside from twitter and SMS which both have self-imposed limits, what's the point of these things?!

I use them in web forums that like to hyphenate long URLs.

Re:Why?

[MikeBabcock]

People who set the cookie on tinyurl, or install the preview add-on for bit.ly don't have to worry about clicking on nasty website links accidentally, they can see what the site redirects to in advance. Swift, the Twitter (Android) app I use on my phone automatically shows previews for links as well, since they're so common when tweeting.

Re:Why?

[bill_mcgonigle]

It isn't overly human readable and isn't as short as a most URL shorteners, but then if it was you'd run out of links very quickly, even within a single domain.

Consider though that 36^6 = 2,176,782,336. slashdot.org/1x4tgr ?

Thinking about it some more, a default ID for an object (e.g. comment) is probably fine for almost all uses. If it's really necessary to include all the short, threshold, etc. items then the traditional shorteners will handle it. But usually they're superfluous.

Re:Why?

[clone53421]

I like adding + at the end better. It plays nicer with copy-and-paste.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had to use one today, because Facebook didn't work right with an ftp:// style URL.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's my (very close) recreation of the events:

http://bit.ly/5qPnvJ

Re:Why?

[IBBoard]

But the point is, why trust your data to an external shortener that can disappear at any moment when you can do it internally and tag it up in a microformat or similar? Yes, internally generated links can still break, but generally only if a) the entire website goes offline (at which point a full link would be broken as well) or b) the webmaster is an idiot and didn't bother maintaining things when he moved pages around (which is under the webmaster's control rather than some external organisation).

As for human readability, I'd rather take my slightly longer one over that meaningless monstrosity any day of the week!

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is actually not necessary. Youtube URLs are already cryptic enough...

Damn!

[Voulnet]

We keep giving more of our independence and power to Google. Google, have mercy!

Nope, still too long.

[VortexCortex]

I, for one, will not be satisfied until my URLs are compressed as a super positions of themselves and stored in qubits.

Perhaps Google can use one of their quantum computers to appease me.

Re:Nope, still too long.

[Yvan256]

Using that new service will require a quantum leap of faith.

Re:Nope, still too long.

[Proteus Child]

Al! I've leaped into a URL! Quick, what does Ziggy say?

Re:Nope, still too long.

[Anonymous Coward]

wat

Re:Nope, still too long.

[OzPeter]

Al! I've leaped into a URL! Quick, what does Ziggy say?

Ziggy says its fine to walk around with no pants on

Re:Nope, still too long.

[maxume]

He wants to know why you took his pants.

More POV than news

[s1lverl0rd]

Timothy here is very quick to say that, just because it is Google, there will be all kinds of privacy problems. I don't get it.

If this service starts to get widespread use, it's news.
When a big privacy leak is discovered, it's news.
When goo.gl shuts down, it's news.

This isn't.

Re:More POV than news

[Tim C]

Timothy didn't say it, unless you're accusing him of putting words in eldavojohn's mouth - the quoted bit is (meant to be) written by the submitter, not the editor. Assuming he didn't change it, Timothy wrote "eldavojohn writes" and "Google's shortening service is called Goo.gl."

And there *are* privacy concerns, Google is doing this to mine it for information, that's what they do. It's hardly the end of the world though - don't like it, don't use it.

Re:More POV than news

[Aeros]

exactly..its not like these other url shorteners don't retain that information and possibly use it as well right? I mean if you use a service like this *someone* will have the data. Why not give it to our future supreme-overloads @ Google and make them happy?

Re:More POV than news

[daveime]

So it's okay for Google to know that you used their search engine to search for midget porn, but not that once you found it, you actually clicked on one of the links ?

There is a choice

[alinuxguruofyore]

We keep giving more of our independence and power to Google. Google, have mercy!

Fortunately, for folks such as yourself Google has provided an opt-out service for you: http://bit.ly/4kDFIH

Tweak.tk wins the shortening war!

[MoobY]

Nothing beats http://tweak.tk/ which provides new domain names as shortened URLs!

Re:Tweak.tk wins the shortening war!

[hattig]

My URL shortening system is called JFGI (or JFBI if you prefer Bing).

Four characters. Beat that!

Btw, I have a submarine patent on the three characters FGI, and also the two character GI, which is more polite, but doesn't have the same level of exasperation with the recipient.

The big win is that you can safely use the above system at work, whereas because shortened URLs are inherently masking the destination, you cannot trust such a link, and thus must therefore never click on it in a work place, in case someone has linked to something abhorrent and vile, like foxnews.com.

Re:Tweak.tk wins the shortening war!

[clone53421]

http://3.ly/uXl
http://a2uhu.tk

Same length. (Both point to http://www.slashdot.org.)

Re:Tweak.tk wins the shortening war!

[vegiVamp]

preview.tinyurl.com at your service, sir.

Re:Tweak.tk wins the shortening war!

[whoop]

Hmm, it shortens http://goo.gl/ to http://googleurlshortener.tk./ I think I broke it.

Oddly, it turns http://tweak.tk/ into http://e80qk.tk./ My brain hurts.

APL?

[Errol backfiring]

It should be possible to write URLs in APL, I guess....

Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

[bbc.co.uk]

Is this really a problem?

[geekmux]

In the days(read decades) of "cut and paste", I really fail to see the real need for URL shortening, other than maybe sending a nice link to a goatse mirror to an unaware "friend" at work.

Sorry, it's kitschy at best. And no, it doesn't "unclutter" jack shit. Learn to insert a damn hyperlink within your text already(yet another decade-old solution to this non-problem). Most input these days is HTML friendly anyway.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[zlogic]

Long links in twitter messages significantly reduce the amount of available characters.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[unity]

Yeah, I can't remember the last time I clicked on one of those "shortened" urls. I just skip over them. I prefer to know where I'm going.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[Frozen-Solid]

They're mostly used on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, where you have a very small limit to the number of characters you can put in a post. If your URL is 50 characters long, that's over a third of your entire post length and leaves little room to post the context of your link. It's also useful for writing a short URL down on paper for a friend to be able to take home and easily type into their web browser for when e-mail is inconvenient. Just because you can't come up with a use for it, doesn't make it any less of a popular service that millions of people use.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[OzPeter]

Long links in twitter messages significantly reduce the amount of available characters.

Google is really going to look foolish when my new, extensible length twitter service comes out. This new service will allow arbitrary length messages and thus totally eliminate the need to link shortening.

Although I haven't yet named my new service, I am leaning towards calling it "eMail", but I need to check if that name has already been taken.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[geekmux]

Long links in twitter messages significantly reduce the amount of available characters.

Root cause analysis. This is a "solution" to a problem that shouldn't exist anyway. Use hyperlinks. Others have only been doing it for years now.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[Tim C]

I wouldn't use them in email or similar, but ignoring the use in SMS or on Twitter, they're a damn sight easier to dictate over the phone.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about printing? Never had to type down a huge url from a printed document or magazine? Wouldn't you rather type just a little code instead?

Re:Is this really a problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even without cut and paste it doesn't make sense. It's a lot easier to type in a few words or whatever rather than a bunch of random characters.

Besides, nobody should like links where you can't see the destination. That's something a scammer/criminal/spammer would use.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[VGPowerlord]

Tell me, which of the following is easier to transcode:
(These are made up examples, but still)
hugehooters.com/hotties
bit.ly/asdf1234

The former is certain longer, but I find it way easier to transcribe whole words than a meaningless jumble of characters.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[kalirion]

I use them to give links over the phone to people I don't share my non-landline contact information with, you insensitive clod!

Re:Is this really a problem?

[gregthebunny]

Here's a tip: stop using Twitter.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the days(read decades) of "cut and paste", I really fail to see the real need for URL shortening, other than maybe sending a nice link to a goatse mirror to an unaware "friend" at work.

Sounds like you never have real-life contact with people. It's far easier to have a shortened URL (or better yet, a customized shortened URL) handy to give to people on the spot than having to say "I'll send it to you the next time I'm near a computer and remember that I'm supposed to send the URL to you."

Re:Is this really a problem?

[FlyingBishop]

No limit on Facebook, though it does truncate with a 'read more' bit of Ajax after so many characters.

Really, it's a massive deficiency in Twitter that there's no way to share a link built into the service. Facebook has a 'share link' button so you don't have to just enter the link in the body of your message.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[zlogic]

I don't use it, but some people do, and they want everyone to see the 100+ symbol link to their "what futurama character are you" test's results.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[dominious]

In the days(read decades) of "cut and paste", I really fail to see the real need for URL shortening, other than maybe sending a nice link to a goatse mirror to an unaware "friend" at work.

I don't have a mouse you insensitive clod!

and yes. I had to type your quote

Re:Is this really a problem?

[Afty0r]

Although I haven't yet named my new service, I am leaning towards calling it "eMail", but I need to check if that name has already been taken.

Well, if it has been taken, maybe you could consider "ElectronicMail" - it's a bit wordier and not as catchy, but it is more descriptive!

Re:Is this really a problem?

[thetoadwarrior]

You don't even need HTML knowledge when most message boards have their own basic code which will generally be generated by some TinyMCE-like javascript pop-up that anyone can use.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[Mr. Slippery]

This is a "solution" to a problem that shouldn't exist anyway. Use hyperlinks.

I was unaware that SMS supported hyperlinks. When was this feature added?

Re:Is this really a problem?

[Duradin]

"Long links in twitter messages significantly reduce the amount of available characters."

Maybe someone should suggest to twitter that they drop the one tweet limit per user so you could put the link in one tweet and then put the rest of the message in the next.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[Richy_T]

There are no hyperlinks in text/plain.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[Dog-Cow]

Are you stupid on purpose, by habit, by reflex, or just plain dumb luck?

Re:Is this really a problem?

[dzfoo]

You can also shorten it to, say, "e-mail". The hyphen makes all the difference in uniqueness.

      -dZ.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[TheRaven64]

SMS doesn't, although MMS allows HTML content, and most smartphones (and 'feature phones') have supported email for a while - and sending an email costs less than sending an SMS on a lot of tariffs. I'm somewhat at a loss as to why you'd want to send a link via SMS though. Finding a URL to send generally needs the sending device to have a web browser and for the URL to be useful at the far end the receiving device also needs to have a web browser. Using a URL shortening service, similarly, requires the sending and receiving devices to have a web browser (the sending device to generate the URL, the receiving device to visit it). If both devices have a web browser and Internet connectivity then there are much better ways of exchanging data between them than SMS.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Great. Less room for banality.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[Mr. Slippery]

I'm somewhat at a loss as to why you'd want to send a link via SMS though.

May I introduce you to Twitter, a popular service which allows users to microblog via SMS, and also to receive microblog entries from other users via SMS?

Finding a URL to send generally needs the sending device to have a web browser

Not at all. "We're meeting at Joe's Bar and Grill. http://www.joesbarandgrill.com/ for directions."

If both devices have a web browser and Internet connectivity then there are much better ways of exchanging data between them than SMS.

There are a large number of people who either don't have phones with these features, have phone with these features but not a plan that allows them, don't know how to use these features on their phones, find SMS more useful than e-mail due to spam issues, or prefer SMS's "push" nature for mobile use.

Love it or lump it, SMS is the de-facto lowest common denomination for mobile-to-mobile data communication (at least here in the U.S.).

Re:Is this really a problem?

[Ichijo]

I prefer to know where I'm going.

This will tell you: http://preview.tinyurl.com/yew8dpl

Re:Is this really a problem?

[MikeBabcock]

All joking aside, you could easily provide database storage for the messages elsewhere, supported by ads, and show only the summary and a link as the real Tweet.

"OzPeter is making a joke ... "

Of course, many people I know already do this using their Blogs.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[MikeBabcock]

You can also set a cookie at tinyurl.com that will remember you prefer to preview your URLs.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[geekmux]

This is a "solution" to a problem that shouldn't exist anyway. Use hyperlinks.

I was unaware that SMS supported hyperlinks. When was this feature added?

Gee, it's only taken 17 years for someone to ask for that from SMS. Do I ask my microwave oven to blend me a frozen drink? Hell no. Damn man, there's only a dozen other technologies out there for sending a hyperlink. Pick one.

Not seeing it

[jDeepbeep]

Perhaps I'm being obtuse, but
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091105 Remi/fc8 Firefox/3.5.5 GTB6
+
Google toolbar Version 6.1.20091119L

I'm not seeing this functionality anywhere in the toolbar

Decenturl still rocks

[Anonymous Coward]

People are obsessed with shortening as much as possible, but I like meaningful URLs that tell me about the contents that's linked to.

http://decenturl.com/ does the job perfectly: http://search.slashdot.decenturl.com/google-url-shortening-service

Re:Decenturl still rocks

[skeeto]

Thanks! That thing's awesome! Though someone could still be misleading with it.

Wouldn't be necessary if...

[Bill Dimm]

Websites wouldn't be tempted to use such long URLs if search engines would stop using the URL (other than the domain name) as a factor in ranking the search results. How many CMSs now stuff an entire article title into the URL purely for SEO purposes? Is that stuff in the URL really telling the search engine anything that can't be found in the <title> or <h1> tags?

Re:Wouldn't be necessary if...

[IBBoard]

That assumes that someone knows how to use HTML and what and tags are for. Given the quality of a lot of content these days (which is down-hill in a different way to early 2000 and the 90s!) I'd be surprised if they did!

Re:Wouldn't be necessary if...

[marcansoft]

It's not just for SEO purposes. Stuffing the article title into the URL is also informative for those who read the URL. Of course, that belongs inside the tag linking to it, but few formats (besides plain HTML) support anchor text that differs from the link (especially all the text-based mediums that have had hyperlinking shoehorned in by using automatic linkification).

Re:Wouldn't be necessary if...

[bickerdyke]

thats not only for search engines.

It's really handy to see where a link is going!

Re:Wouldn't be necessary if...

[Yvan256]

Long URLs also (should) let us know what's behind a link before we actually click on it.

www.apple.com/ipod/
www.microsoft.com/office/
www.nintendo.com/wii/
and so on...

If you have garbage such as "&id=54353" in your non-search URLs, you're doing it wrong.

Re:Wouldn't be necessary if...

[Bill Dimm]

So, to summarize, people don't normally see these obnoxiously long URLs in HTML because of anchor text, and in other formats where a URL must be displayed (like a printed magazine article), people don't see the obnoxiously long URLs because services like bit.ly are used to shorten them. So, what was the point of the long URLs, other than SEO, again?

Re:Wouldn't be necessary if...

[FlyingBishop]

So when the linked site goes down you have some information about the content beyond bit.ly/ERFHUQ.

And when even supposedly tech-savvy people can't properly back-up their webpages, it's incredibly shortsighted to use a link that tells you nothing about the content.

Re:Wouldn't be necessary if...

[Bill Dimm]

It's really handy to see where a link is going!

Except that you don't see where it is going if the URL is so obnoxiously long that people feel compelled to use bit.ly and other shortening services. If people use bit.ly, not only do you not see the article title that is stuffed in the URL, you don't even see the domain name. You don't know whether you are being sent to cio.com or goatse.cx.

Re:Wouldn't be necessary if...

[bickerdyke]

Yes.. but with most CMS, the other option would be, short, unreadable URL with or without bit.ly.

As most CMS tend create urls like http://www.foobar.example/index.php?articleid=51243 thats not much different from http://www.bit.ly.example/51234 (less special charackters like ? or = that people might mess up, but besides that...)

http://www.foobar.example/Never-gonna-give-you-up is much more informative for human readers. Espescially if you have a list of URLs (history or proxy log) that link to the same site, you'll be glad for having the article caption in the URL.

Say, your friends mailed you several links over the past few weeks.

http://www.foobar.example/index.php?articleid=51243
http://www.foobar.example/index.php?articleid=28043
http://www.foobar.example/index.php?articleid=79344
http://www.foobar.example/index.php?articleid=97421
http://www.foobar.example/index.php?articleid=12034

Would you be able to see which one was the good one? Much easier with

http://www.foobar.example/Never-gonna-give-you-up
http://www.foobar.example/Natalie-Portman-in-Leia-Slave-Dress
http://www.foobar.example/boring_surveillance
http://www.foobar.example/Goatse-the-movie
http://www.foobar.example/Rickrolling

But you were right. A CMS with a good SEF-URL-Scheme should try to be as tense as those examples. http://www.foobar.example/Natalie-Portman/index.php?sessid=uj99346Ab320ljkldjf&user=woheverwaslookingitup&page=3&find=in-Leia-Slave-Dress&showads=true unites the worst of two worlds.

P.S.
I tried my best to explain to slashdot that these aren't actual urls.

Re:Wouldn't be necessary if...

[Bill Dimm]

So when the linked site goes down you have some information about the content beyond bit.ly/ERFHUQ.

I'm not sure why you've pulled bit.ly into the discussion in this sentence. Since the bit.ly URL just redirects to the full URL, bit.ly doesn't impact the amount of information that you have if the linked site goes down. Now, if bit.ly itself goes down, then you are truly screwed, with absolutely no information about where the link was going to. That's a very good argument for keeping URLs short enough so that people aren't tempted to use bit.ly on them.

And when even supposedly tech-savvy people [stackoverflow.com] can't properly back-up their webpages, it's incredibly shortsighted to use a link that tells you nothing about the content.

You almost had a point here, but you kind of missed the target. If an article is gone, I don't think you've gained very much by knowing what the title was. Check the URL in web.archive.org; if it's there, you're in great shape (regardless of whether the URL was long and descriptive or not), and if it's not there you've basically got nothing, regardless of how long the URL is. Now, you could have argued that if the website operator changed the URL of the article (rather than removing/losing the article), and the old URL contained the full title, you might be able to use the site's search engine to find the new location of the article. You would have a point there. But, website operators that aren't idiots don't change URLs. In fact, I've seen quite a few websites that stuff article titles in the URLs break links by correcting typos in the article title, causing the URL to change. So, having the title in the URL helps you to fix a problem (find an article with a changed URL) that is caused by having the URL in the title (making the URL easier to change).

Re:Wouldn't be necessary if...

[houghi]

That is why tinurl has a preview: http://tinyurl.com/preview.php
You could argue wether this should be on or of by standard, but it is good that you have the ability to make your own choice.

Re:Wouldn't be necessary if...

[Bill Dimm]

I think we're in complete agreement. Descriptive URLs are better as long as they are short enough to be used in a practical way. As soon as they become so long that people are tempted to use bit.ly, they become worse than using an articleid, because with bit.ly you have far less info that is visible to the user -- you don't even have the domain name. If the URL is too long to fit in the location bar of the browser, something is wrong -- they are probably aiming at SEO, not a human reader.

If Google would penalize any URL longer than 60 characters (long enough to fit nicely on one line in an email) in their search rankings, and make it publicly known that they were doing that, the web would probably be a better place.

I tried to paste in (as text, not links) two examples of actual obnoxiously-long URLs, one being 150 characters and the other being 135, and slashdot blocked me, saying "Filter error: That's an awful long string of letters there" I think that pretty much makes my point about long URLs being a bad idea.

Re:Wouldn't be necessary if...

[bickerdyke]

Wow thats fantastic!

Obviously the tinyurl is trying to solve the problem that wouldn't even exist at all if tiny url wouldn't have tried to solve another problem - that wasn't a problem at all in the first place!!

Re:Wouldn't be necessary if...

[Bill Dimm]

...that is caused by having the URL in the title (making the URL easier to change).

Obviously, I meant to say "having the title in the URL"

Re:Wouldn't be necessary if...

[maxwell demon]

www.apple.com/ipod/

That's obviously a collection of mp3s from Apple Records for use on your iPod.

www.microsoft.com/office/

This clearly holds a list of the offices at Microsoft.

SCNR :-)

Re:Wouldn't be necessary if...

[FlyingBishop]

But, website operators that aren't idiots don't change URLs.

Yes they do. Everyone does it. Nobody likes to do it, but inevitably it eventually happens to some pages. Furthermore, what if I'm not linking a specific site, but just an article that I happened to find on that site? Then that's where you really want something descriptive in the title. Just because a website ceases to exist doesn't necessarily mean the content I was linking to is gone.

Here's an example, though obviously this is unlikely to ever disappear:
http://catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

On the other hand, say it did disappear. Then you would have everything you needed to know about what I'm linking to. And I think that links should describe everything you need to know about the content so that you could conceivably figure out what it was if the content is still available somewhere.

Re:Wouldn't be necessary if...

[merreborn]

Good URIs are just a good idea, period. That's not advice from some shady SEO scumbag, either. That's tim berners-lee and the w3c.

Surely:

http://example.com/articles/man-bites-dog

is vastly superior from the user's point of view to:

http://example.com/cgi-bin/article.php3?PHPSESSID=0983sdf0er888fsd&article_id=73522

Which one are you going to remember? Which one would you rather read over the phone?

Re:Wouldn't be necessary if...

[Bill Dimm]

Surely:

http://example.com/articles/man-bites-dog [example.com]

is vastly superior from the user's point of view to:

http://example.com/cgi-bin/article.php3?PHPSESSID=0983sdf0er888fsd&article_id=73522 [example.com]

Which one are you going to remember? Which one would you rather read over the phone?

So, you agree with me, right? The short URL is better than the obnoxiously long one.

Just to make sure we are all on the same page, I'm complaining about URLs that are so long that they become difficult to use. I'm complaining about URLs that are so long that you need a URL shortening service like bit.ly to use them in common contexts, which is not the case with your man-bites-dog example. I'm talking about URLs that are so long that you can't even read them in your browser because they don't fit in the location bar. I'm talking about URLs like this 150-character long mess, that I can't even paste into Slashdot as plain text because Slashdot won't accept a string that long. Such URLs aren't practical. Nobody can remember them, read them on the phone, or type them in without getting them wrong. That much text in a URL isn't designed for human consumption, it's there for SEO.

Re:Wouldn't be necessary if...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Commissioner of Official Languages in Canada disagrees with you. It feels that information in URLs is so important that they have to actively reflect both official languages (English and French). A lot of money is being spent to convert all existing URLs to either English or French-only or bilingual format. Even the query portion of the request has to comply!!!

For instance, look at the Canada site:
http://canada.gc.ca/directories-repertoires/direct-eng.html

Merci/Thank you

Re:Wouldn't be necessary if...

[Bill Dimm]

But, website operators that aren't idiots don't change URLs.

Yes they do. Everyone does it. Nobody likes to do it, but inevitably it eventually happens to some pages.

Not everyone does it. Tim Berners-Lee doesn't. If you need to give an article a new URL because you've changed CMSs, or for some other reason, put in a redirect to send people accessing the old URL to the new location. There is virtually never a reason, beyond laziness or stupidity, to break URLs when you move something. Perhaps my original statement that you quoted should have said "don't break" instead of "don't change," but I think the point was clear from the context.

Here's an example, though obviously this is unlikely to ever disappear:
http://catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

I don't have any problem with that URL at all. I never said URLs shouldn't be descriptive; I said that they shouldn't be so long that they become difficult to use. They shouldn't be so long that you need a URL shortening service like bit.ly to cope with them. What is it that motivates someone to create a URL that is 150 characters long? It's not an effort to make the URL more useful, it's just SEO. See more details here

Not for consumer use

[popo]

"Google URL Shortener is currently available for Google products and not for broader consumer use."

So I guess bit.ly still wins?

Re:Not for consumer use

[clone53421]

No... 3.ly!

Best viewed through Google Goggles

[Zarf]

This seemed utterly rubbish to me until I put on my Google Goggles. Now everything looks awesome.

Where there go my business plans

[axl917]

I was all set to name my company Goo and base it out of Greenland.

Damn you, Google!

Re:Where there go my business plans

[AndrewNeo]

You raise an interesting question - if you actually started and trademarked a company named Goo in Greenland, couldn't you 'force' Google to give the name to you? (Therefore breaking the shortening service)

Re:Where there go my business plans

[Dunbal]

Well you could always start a Nigerian company called bi.ng ?

Re:Where there go my business plans

[Xuranova]

Google would just buy you send you on your merry way.

Re:Where there go my business plans

[Chrisq]

Google would just buy you send you on your merry way.

Assuming thay haven't already set up a "paper" company called "goo" in Greenland.

Re:Where there go my business plans

[Chrisq]

Well you could always start a Nigerian company called bi.ng ?

Great idea. You'd probably make US 20,000,000 million dollars and need to find some helpful person in a Western country to move it out of Nigeria. I'm sure you would be willing to pay a 10% finder's fee.

Re:Where there go my business plans

[IBBoard]

Probably not, since Google's domain came first. Definitely not now you've shown intent to name the company that purely for the domain name impact ;)

I hate all shorteners.

[Anonymous Coward]

Call me old fashioned, but I like to see where a link is going before I click it.

Re:I hate all shorteners.

[jDeepbeep]

Call me old fashioned, but I like to see where a link is going before I click it.

Even if it's so cute?

They do?

[Xest]

When I had the misfortunate of using one the other day it chucked up a page telling me the service was busy and to try again later.

Quite how popping up a page stating the service was busy is any easier than just issuing a redirect to the required site I don't really know, but it did, and it was stupid as there was no way to ascertain the underlying URL it was meant to redirect to from the stupid shortened URL I clicked.

At least with Google it's a pretty safe bet they'll be able to handle the traffic, and their URLs will likely remain indefinitely unlike others who may (and some have) go bust and lose all the links they stored.

Re:They do?

[petermgreen]

Quite how popping up a page stating the service was busy is any easier than just issuing a redirect to the required site I don't really know
Issuing a redirect to the right place requires access to the database, issueing an error message does not.

P.S. if you are running a website please help reduce the need for url shorteners by using sensible urls.

Re:They do?

[cheshiremoe]

It is easier for the server to put up a busy page... the busy HTML is cached where the redirect requires a query to the database. If the Database is down or congested then the server returns a busy signal rather than telling the user were broken or timing out.

Re:They do?

[Daniel_Staal]

Quite how popping up a page stating the service was busy is any easier than just issuing a redirect to the required site I don't really know, but it did, and it was stupid as there was no way to ascertain the underlying URL it was meant to redirect to from the stupid shortened URL I clicked.

Static page vs. database lookup. The latter will take a lot more resources.

Re:They do?

[Xest]

Fair point, but god knows what kind of shitty hardware they're running on if they can't even manage single database queries for a simple 1 to 1 relationship?

Is a database even the right solution here in the first place though? 301 redirects should be handled by the webserver without need for a database no? Assuming these URLs are designed to be held indefinitely then it really should just be a case of writing once, and reading in future. I suppose with the amount of URLs they handle though it's not as simple as just writing to config files because large configs would themselves create problems.

It's just a guess, but I'd wager the real problem is they do more than just redirect you, like logging your IP, storing cookies, browser data etc. and so forth for targetted advertising. I'd bet it's probably this extra work that creates the real strain.

Of course, if this is the case I imagine Google will do exactly the same because advertising is what Google do, the difference is I'd imagine Google have the resources to do it properly still.

Re:They do?

[maxwell demon]

Why not simply create a new static redirection page for each shortened URL? After all, the redirection shouldn't actually change afterwards anyway. Handling of non-existent redirects would be done by the normal 404 mechanism. Race conditions could be avoided by first writing the file with a special name, and renaming it to the destination afterwards (I think file renaming is an atomic process, as far as applications are concerned).

Re:They do?

[DragonWriter]

P.S. if you are running a website please help reduce the need for url shorteners by using sensible urls.

Sensible URLs are human-readable and meaningful. This often is directly opposed to ultrashort URLs, which are convenient for use in venues (e.g., SMS, Twitter) where bits are at a premium. Shortening services exist to provide the latter, not the former, and providing the former won't reduce demand for the latter.

Re:They do?

[Daniel_Staal]

You start running into issues with the filesystem: how many files you can create in a single directory, how well it can handle that, etc. (Also, a database means you can change how you are doing the redirects should you want/need to at some future point with very little work.)

The people building the site in question seemed to think a database was a better solution overall. If you want to create one that uses a filesystem instead, it should be a very short Perl script to run it. Go right ahead and see if you can make it work. ;)

Re:They do?

[sexconker]

Why not simply create a new static redirection page for each shortened URL?

Because they're stupid.
That's why everyone does everything.

Re:They do?

[daveime]

theproblemismostsensibleurlsaretakenbydomainspammerssothisistheonlyoptionleft.com

Re:They do?

[SEWilco]

A filesystem is a database for files. But most filesystems are designed to have many fewer items than a database is designed to handle.

Re:They do?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is a database even the right solution here in the first place though? 301 redirects should be handled by the webserver without need for a database no? Assuming these URLs are designed to be held indefinitely then it really should just be a case of writing once, and reading in future. I suppose with the amount of URLs they handle though it's not as simple as just writing to config files because large configs would themselves create problems.

Config files wouldn't be an option. They'd require the server read the entire database into memory or be forced to re-parse the file constantly. And it wouldn't scale to multiple servers. A SQL database would work, but it seems like a problem that's tailor made for one of the massively scalable NoSQL databases. And as luck would have it, Google's internal infrastructure is largely based on one of the poster-children of the NoSQL movement.

It's just a guess, but I'd wager the real problem is they do more than just redirect you, like logging your IP, storing cookies, browser data etc. and so forth for targetted advertising. I'd bet it's probably this extra work that creates the real strain.

There's no reason why any of that stuff would have to cause any performance penalty. The overhead of setting cookies is minuscule and any server-side logging can be done asynchronously after the redirect has been issued and the connection to the client closed. That said, there's no reason to assume that any of the small companies running the services have made sensible engineering decisions to avoid the performance hit of the things you mentioned.

Re:They do?

[petermgreen]

I agree sometimes sensible (meaningful and moderate length) is better (e.g. when speaking or remembering the url) and sometimes supershort (what you get from a shortening service) is better (services with horriblly constrained message size limits).

However in nearly all cases both are much better than a long horrible url. Therefore I belive that more sane urls would reduce (but not eliminate) the demand for shortening services.

Re:They do?

[MikeBabcock]

Sensible URLs are rarely short. For example, the URL for this article is quite sensible -- but http://search.slashdot.org/story/09/12/15/1323247/Google-Unveils-googl-URL-Shortening-Service is hardly short. Now sure, everyone could implement their own shortening service and use it when people click "share" links on their site, so that 'sharing' a Slashdot story on Facebook would result in something like http://slashdot.org/af32g38d which would resolve to the above URL.

That said, it seems like a horrific waste of coding effort to repeat for every website.

Re:They do?

[MikeBabcock]

I quite like the fact that with http://tinyurl.com/ I can set a cookie that will always take me to tinyurl itself and show me what the shortened link redirects to before actually following the redirect. This would be much harder to do without a database driven system, and a good database structure results in faster lookups than most filesystems anyway.

Re:They do?

[clone53421]

If bits are at such a premium that “ultrashort” URLs are better than “sensible” ones, we need to lift the artificial restriction on the number of bits available. This isn’t the 1980s anymore.

Re:They do?

[DragonWriter]

If bits are at such a premium that "ultrashort" URLs are better than "sensible" ones, we need to lift the artificial restriction on the number of bits available.

Its not just bits, of course (though SMS and related technology restrict -- or, rather, make expensive -- bits) but also display environments, in some cases. Where a URL may need to be viewed (e.g., in a mechanism that supports text but not links) on a small screen (as, say, on a mobile phone), a long URL is undesirable even outside of transmission restrictions or costs.

update

[jDeepbeep]

Apparently FF is not discovering a toolbar update. I had to uninstall it, then download the Dangermouse release to get the new sharing/URL functionality.

Better idea

[2phar]

For real short URLs, we should just give every machine a NUMBER instead of a .. oh wait..

Re:Better idea

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

That should work just fine.

If you actually know of any setups where each distinct URL has its own IP, that is...

Re:Better idea

[maxume]

Domains aren't the problem, CMS systems that expose 99% of the implementation in the url are the problem.

Google Gibraltar

[Ruvim]

So, that's how Google Gibraltar looks like... It's funny how the official meaning of TLD is always totally ignored. Case in point: as many others, White House uses bit.ly for its URL shortening on White House Tweeter posts... never mind that .ly TLD is assigned to Libya.

tl;dc

[Hurricane78]

Five letters? Pah. Too long, didn’t click! ;)

This *does* serve a purpose, though...

[lwsimon]

Whether or not you use or like URL shorteners, the fact is, a lot of them are used. The Google name behind this one will give it staying power.

Sucks though, as I have a shortener in staging right now that I was about to launch to try and solve the problem of stability. Oh well.

Grouping Urls

[Xenobiotic]

I like the idea by these guys. http://grurl.me/ Add some urls to a list, and get a short url in place

Re:Google Gibraltar

[Tacvek]

I hope you mean What Goo Greenland looks like.
Google Gibraltar would be google.gi

Where's the security around this?

[HockeyPuck]

With browsers having built in security to tell me if some website harbors malware upon accessing it, why do people through this concept out the window and click on any tiny url that could potentially send them to goat.sx. Seems that this defeats the purpose of me being able to see where the link goes before clicking on it.

Re:Where's the security around this?

[maxume]

You can work around the problem:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/40582

I looked for a website providing similar lookups but didn't find one.

Re:Where's the security around this?

[dzfoo]

Wouldn't the browser be able to block it when the 302 redirect response comes back? Or does it only block URLs entered by the user?

        -dZ.

Okay....

[Anonymous Coward]

...I conclude that Jupiter is pie-shaped. What conclusions does the rest of you have?

Preview url

[De Lemming]

Most of the time I cross such a shortened url, I want to see the full url before the redirect is completed. Tinyurl's preview option let me do that, without an account/login, it just saves the setting in a cookie.

Bit.ly has a Firefox plugin to preview urls, but I don't want to install a browser plugin for each service. And what if I'm using another browser?

I'm hoping Google will implement something similar to Tinyurl's system.

Re:Preview url

[IBBoard]

There are common alternatives, someone just needs to write the plugin. ChromeMUSE (which I patched an improvement for for my own use) uses LongURL.org to do its replacement. If you want to stick with Firefox then all you need is someone to write a wrapper around that (and for LongURL.org to keep updating their list of supported sites with all of these other sites people make).

Re:Preview url

[jmarkantes]

Here's one single firefox add-on that displays the full url in a few different ways (href/status bar, mouseover, expanded link): http://www.longurlplease.com/ J

Re:Preview url

[vegiVamp]

Just stuff the following into a (firefox, maybe ie) bookmark:

javascript:void(location.href='http://tinyurl.com/create.php?url='+location.href)

Re:Preview url

[IBBoard]

That's shortening. The complaint here was short URLs where you don't know what you're clicking through to ;) What you need for that is to do a request to the API to say "give me the long version". Firefox has a plugin for a single site/API, but longurl.org has an API that wraps multiple services, so one request can lengthen URLs from all the top sites, and the Chromium plugin I mentioned uses that. With my little fix I need never see a Bitly or Trim URL again :)

Re:Preview url

[SpydeZ]

For Firefox, there's Long URL Please. Works great.

Business Deal

[Verdatum]

Google had to pay millions of dollars to game development studio, 2D Boy to purchase the Official Greenland homepage for World of Goo

Finally!!!

[topcoder]

Finally i will be able to type http:///., to access my favorite page :).

it's a feature, stupid

[noric]

The summary paints 'publicly display aggregate and non-personally identifiable statistics about particular shortened links' in a negative light, but this is actually a feature of su.pr.

'Su.pr is the only URL shortener that also helps your content get discovered! Every Su.pr URL exposes your content to StumbleUpon's nearly 8 million users!'. Yes well now it isn't the only one :p.

Google does some bad shit, but I'm getting a little tired of people pretending they are clever because they 'out' google for doing some nefarious value-adding or reasonable activity.

Article on hacker news yesterday:
'If Microsoft had Google’s market share in search, is there any doubt that they’d be systematically demoting or even banning their competitors in the search results? Demoting someone in Google is a virtual death sentence, and yet not only has Google never been accused of using this vast power, the idea itself is almost unimaginable.'

Re:it's a feature, stupid

[sexconker]

'If Microsoft had Google’s market share in search, is there any doubt that they’d be systematically demoting or even banning their competitors in the search results? Demoting someone in Google is a virtual death sentence, and yet not only has Google never been accused of using this vast power, the idea itself is almost unimaginable.'

Google has been accused of it, has done it, and no, it's not unimaginable.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

What we need...

[JHromadka]

is an IP address shortening service.

But what about?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about the little guys? How do they pretend to be able to compete with Google? There are sites like http://wynd.me and http://is.gd and http://tiny.cc that are all lesser known entities in this arena. Google releases a URL shortener and it gets picked up by Slashdot instantly. The authors of the other sites fight to even be listed by Google much less have the benefits of the Slashdot effect to bring in new users. How would a smaller site with fun features get the word out? Especially in the wake of the news of yet another facet of the Internet that is about to be swallowed whole by the Google monster.

Re:Google Gibraltar

[Anonymous Coward]

.gl is Greenland. Gibraltar is .gi.

They totally missed it...

[PortHaven]

They should have registered "Go.ogl", what a perfect name for a url shortener.

Re:They totally missed it...

[lobiusmoop]

I would have thought g.gl would be better (i.e. just drop out all the vowels, in classic UNIX fashion). 2 less characters to type, which is kind-of the point of URL shorteners anyway.

Re:Google Gibraltar

[MikeBabcock]

http://cr.yp.to/ ignores the meaning as well :) But its a cool domain to own.

Re:Google Gibraltar

[Anonymous Coward]

Google Greenland: http://www.google.gl/
Google Gibraltar, (un?)fortunately, doesn't exist.