Google URL Shortener Opened To the Public
Anonymusing writes "Just what the world needs, another URL shortener, right? Google seems to think so, and it's making its own widely available to anyone — complete with tracking and statistics — for free. As noted on its blog: 'There are many shorteners out there with great features, so some people may wonder whether the world really needs yet another. As we said late last year, we built goo.gl with a focus on quality. With goo.gl, every time you shorten a URL, you know it will work, it will work fast, and it will keep working. You also know that when you click a goo.gl shortened URL, you're protected against malware, phishing and spam using the same industry-leading technology we use in search and other products.' Is bit.ly shaking in its boots?"
As in, one more place where Google gets to track you and make you a statistic.
AccountKiller
- and tubgirl, etc?
Is bit.ly shaking in its boots?
Dunno, I've never heard of them before. Should I have?
g.gl, get to it google engineers. Short as hell.
Works like a charm!
First goatse.fr goo.gl post!
Only if slashdot let's me put the hugurl.com version of goo.gl! (Filter error: That's an awful long string of letters there.)
Who's bit.ly?
goo.gl shortens goo.gl url's as well! No, I will not write an evil script. Someone has to do the 'No Evil', right?
Error 001
Security Scan and Virus Detection do not work with your operating system.
Just tested it out: Mapping "test.com" to "http://goo.gl/EkNa". I get 404 from "http://goo.gl/ekna"...
As a test I created a link to this slashdot article. I will post the statistics after a day. http://goo.gl/Kjyl
The last thing the world need is yet another semisolid fat for food preparation.
Wait, what's the subject again?
I've always preferred SoCuteURL. It makes URL's that are sometimes short, sometimes long, but always a lot easier to retype (say, from a text message) than a computer-generated hash. For example, I've got a better chance of telling someone how to type in socuteurl.com/yappypupperpig (so cute u r l dot com slash yappy pupper pig) than I do goo.gl slash anything.
Of course, I also have a soft spot in my heart for http://urlshorteningservicefortwitter.com/ -- but they refuse to "shorten" http://goo.gl/ for me, saying "This URL has been rejected to prevent the universe from collapsing on itself."
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
....it works pretty well.
tr.im was a great URL shortener, too bad they aren't open for business any more. Not only that but tr.im is a much more descriptive name than bit.ly as far as what it does.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
easter egg? coincidence? conspiracy? goo.gl/page appears to redirect to a (barely) german-language page for a chrome extension that uses the goo.gl service. I wonder what other URL codes may have already been "reserved" (maybe they will have "premium" redirects like other shorteners have implemented)
Like Wave, right?
Yet another attempt by Google to track a significant portion of the web traffic.
Never gonna give you up... without compensation.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
this reminds me of the old "subscribe to my free newsletter". who the hell pays for an URL shortener in the first place?
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
For example, http://goo.gl/sl7U has a redirection loop.
I prefer TinyURL because it can give me a preview of the expanded URL.
I wrote a script that would keep re-submitting my URL until I ended up with goo.gl/R2D2, but found out it was already used. I think I'll make a mosaic of the 23,864 QR barcodes on the side of a building somewhere as a social commentary.
Google chrome provides security warning while trying to navigate to suspicious site. Will this be available while generating/clicking shortened link from any browser - I mean independent of browser capability and settings?
bits and bytes of life should serve the needy - My bits and bytes
How about this, not tubgirl but it is w1Kd :
http://goo.gl/w1Kd
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
It would be interesting to test all the 4-letter/number combos and see what the distribution of content is. A simple test with a common 4-letter word shows that they're censoring words from the url shortening pool.
BTW cr4p brings you to facebook - how appropriate.
The interesting thing is that goo.gl gets "shortened" to goo.gl/zoan.
I think it would be pretty cool if somebody would write a mod for wordpress that can automatically convert links you share in your posts to goo.gl urls... that could make the stats analysis easier. Also, it would be pretty sweet if the link had a hover tag that showed the original url to dispel visitors skepticism.
It was just a url I grabbed off Youtube for a test of goo.gl and was amused by the short url it gave me.
I think your cr4p link is destined to become famous.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
By hijacking a foreign country's TLD Google has messed up World Of Goo's plans on getting goo.gl for their Greenland offices.
I wish I could take credit for it. That's the sort of thing that "just works", and you KNOW it's going to make the rounds.
Mother Nature might be a B*tch, but she also has a sense of humour.
Still not as good as shadyurl :
http://5z8.info/bomb-plans_p7p8n_stalin
I've used goo.gl through shareaholic for about half a year.
"...As we said late last year, we built goo.gl with a focus on quality. With goo.gl, every time you shorten a URL, you know it will work, it will work fast, and it will keep working."
404: Page not found – the page http://goo.gl/action/shorten does not exist.
If you typed in or copied/pasted this URL, make sure you included all the characters, with no extra punctuation.
"...every time you shorten a URL, you know it will work, it will work fast..."
Apparently their legions of PhDs can't figure out how to use adverbs properly.
Wow! I shorten goo.gl to http://goo.gl/cYfN .
Wait...How is that shorter?
Someone please tell Professor X to "Find all the URL shorteners, and destroy them."
-kgj
I am not a number!
I am the aggregate of a huge array of numbers!
-kgj
At least with TinyURL you can enable preview :http://tinyurl.com/preview.php
You can also link to the preview, so people won't be fired or offended by NSFW stuff.
I have placed the following in mu bashrc, so I can check others as well: //p';}
check(){ curl -sI $1 | sed -n 's/Location:.*
Not everybody will be able to do that.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Unless you're of the opinion that if google were to go bankrupt, it would take the US economy down with it, I don't think that expression means what you think it means.
McAfee has one too... http://mcaf.ee/ Not that I would trust them any more than the other url shorteners, but they claim to protect against malware too. Heck, any website administrator who is bored can set one up on their existing domain without a cute URL.
Makes me wonder if somebody has been playing...
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It's still less reliable than a URL to the actual page, and can still be used to trick people into visiting sites they would not want to visit if they knew the URL. And remember, these shorteners should only be used when a short URL is needed. Anywhere you can embed a link, it doesn't matter if it's ridiculously long. Only where the URL itself must be included as plain text does its length even possibly matter.
goo.gl/GpGu goo.gl/C5a8
http://goo.gl/SEJS http://goo.gl/GpGu http://goo.gl/C5a8
...it has link customization, i.e. with bit.ly, it will assign me a link but then I can change it to something like "Bourdain1" which is easier to read off the phone and type in then some random, albeit short, alphanumeric characters
the url shortener will work as well as their app engine site works, that is to say after a while people will realize its just another vector for spam and malware and begin adding it web filters and email filters at carrier gateways. Working for a rather large email service provider, i can assure you after a month chances are very good ill have the entire subnet theyre peddling this from on my various scanning clusters collective shitlists.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I find url shorteners to be dangerous. You don't know that it links to. And I find that everyone seems to use them, even the security "professionals" that it really makes no sense.
While I understand how handy they are when you need to share a link with someone in voice or something. But I never click on them from articles or anything. I refuse.
Imagine the Internet is a gun. URL Shorteners are the chambers. A bad link is the bullet.
Now imagine that gun is pointed at your head, and everytime you click on a shortened URL, you are pulling the trigger.
Be seeing you...
goatse, tubgirl, etc?
I can't imagine they could possibly protect you from every possible. . . undesirable thing that someone might create a shortened link to.
Sherene Aisha, is that you?
http://www.facebook.com/people/Sherene-Aisha/100000786219945
Google, like all big businesses, love gateway architectures.
It annoyed them that surfers were using someone else as a gateway to websites. Hence, goo.gl.
Control all methods of access to information.
http://goo.gl/btch
Is a document where Brazil establishes an embassy in Tuvalu. Hm. Gotta be a Godwin in there somewhere.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Dot.tk is still the best URL shortener for me. At least with that you can make a URL that appears to link to an actual website as opposed to unreadable garbage.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
created April 13th, 2010 - and only 2 clicks. One of them was mine, and the other one was ...?
Long URL: www.facebook.com/pages/I-Support-Death-by-Sandwich/114394155245805?v=wall
I guess a lot of the testers use Failbook.
Lessee... they tried making a browser, an OS, a VOIP app, an office suite... all duds. They bought YouTube and now they're ruining it by putting ads on top of people's videos. Everything Google touches turns to s&#t except, of course, for search. Maybe they should stick with what they do right. I'm sure the shareholders would appreciate the savings in the form of dividends.
All those others are tracking you and making you a statistic except you don't know what evil companies they sell the info to.
No sig today...
Slashdot made me! I've been given the dutiful duty of mod points, and it's my duty to verify the troll mod. Unfortunatley... Geeee Gads! Where's a rickroll when ya need one! Posted anon so I can still potentially rein terror
l3:)
- Chrome rocks. Far from being a Dud, it's the only browser I use. .. and of course, search rocks
- Android rocks too.
- Google reader rocks
- news.google.com rocks
- Google maps & Google Earth rocks
-
I agree with you about the ads in the videos, however, they're still experimenting with how to monetize youtube. Let them. They'll figure it out eventually.
The Office Suite? Well, it works very well for some folks, not so well for others. Haven't tried the VOIP stuff. The OS hasn't been released AFAIK.
Lessee... they tried making a browser, an OS, a VOIP app, an office suite... all duds. They bought YouTube and now they're ruining it by putting ads on top of people's videos. Everything Google touches turns to s&#t except, of course, for search.
Maybe they should stick with what they do right. I'm sure the shareholders would appreciate the savings in the form of dividends.
Without commenting on your interesting and unusual interpretation of the word "duds", I do think you should have had a look at their stock performance before saying silly things about shareholder value and dividends.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Thank you
You're welcome
Hi,
Am I the only one concerned that this seems to be case sensitive? I definitely dont want to give out Case Sensitive shortened URLs - Seems wrong fundamentally.
Enlighten me...
Gani
Google Wave is functioning _as of right now_. What about in two years?
The cancelled the "any URL to RSS" feature in Google Reader yesterday. I was told about this... yesterday. Yay for giving me time to set up a different system!
"BTW cr4p brings you to facebook - how appropriate."
So does http://goo.gl/tOmH
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I, myself, like to use http://nig.gr/
On the stat pages, you should be able to click on the referrer and then the chart and the visitor profile data should dynamically update to only showing you stats for that referrer. Ditto if you click on a specific field in the visitor profile as well. We all know they have the data, so just let us see it with some simple scripting.
I really can't see any fundamental wrongness in that, but I can see the fundamental rightness of many more short URLs being possible.
As in "let's do some bubbybinky tonight...". How fitting!
$ curl -I http://goo.gl/info/cr4p
HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Set-Cookie: authed=1;Path=/
Location: https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=urlshortener&continue=http://goo.gl/info/cr4p?authed%3D1&followup=http://goo.gl/info/cr4p?authed%3D1&passive=true&go=true
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Date: Fri, 01 Oct 2010 11:41:25 GMT
Expires: Fri, 01 Oct 2010 11:41:25 GMT
Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
Server: GSE
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Thanks, but I'll keep using http://ur1.ca/ (or no shortener at all).
Long links with loads of parameters are a bad practice that should be avoided by good site coding conventions.
Search engines appear to encourage this by counting keywords in a URL. This leads database-driven news sites and blogs to include an article's title in its URL instead of just an article ID, and it leads online stores to include the product's short description instead of just the SKU. For example, hobby store MyAtomic did this before PayPal shut it down, allegedly for trying to compete with Toys "R" Us who shares a major investor with PayPal, but I dye grass.
Anywhere you can embed a link, it doesn't matter if it's ridiculously long
Unless, for example, a forum has an upper limit on the length of a signature.
This is a goo.gl shortened link to the very thread that it is placed in. Is that some sort of infinite loop or something? Am I going to unravel space-time with this?
Oh well, only one way to find out!
http://goo.gl/iiuP
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
Definitely some tester at google, since there appear to be MANY that point to the same account.
Ole, just ducking another boring nothingness PR from Google. Gee, don't they ever develop anything real?
http://go.usa.gov/ It limits the URLs being shortened to just those ending in .mil, .gov, .fed.us, and .si.edu and thus helps prevent you from getting rick-rolled or worse -unless someone puts the questionable content on the .gov website its self, which in that case they wouldn't need the URL shortening step to hide their intent in the first place. Unfortunately it also only accepts registration from the same .mil, .gov, .fed.us, and .si.edu domains, so it doesn't do me much good, but it may help someone else out.
"404: Page not found – the page http://goo.gl/action/shorten does not exist."
Add .qr to the end of shortend url and you get the QR code:
So for this page: http://goo.gl/pWiq.qr
----- I refuse to have an argument with an unarmed person
Yes, if there's one thing I'm sure of, it's that the shareholders in Google wish they never invested in such a horribly bad company *Sarcasim off*
http://goo.gl/91G0 will finally bite its own tail :D
I just felt like dropping by to remind you that you're a total moron. There are lots of reasons that you're a moron, but I don't really feel like enumerating all of them, as it is rather late in the evening.