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Google Unveils goo.gl URL Shortening Service

Posted by timothy on from the boiling-a-frog-in-google dept.

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.

6 of 242 comments (clear)

  1. Other services work fine by i_want_you_to_throw_ · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

  2. Why? by Yvan256 · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Why? by thetoadwarrior · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

  3. Re:Is this really a problem? by unity · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Wouldn't be necessary if... by marcansoft · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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).

  5. Re:Wouldn't be necessary if... by Yvan256 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.