Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Google will soon make its own contribution to the problem of link rot by shutting down the Google URL Shortener service in 2025.
The Google URL Shortener was launched in 2009 as an attempt to make lengthy links manageable by feeding them into Google's shortener, which spat out shorter ones in the form of https://goog.gl/*. Nine years later, Google decided to pull the service and direct users to Firebase Dynamic Links (FDL) instead.
At the time, Google said, "All existing links will continue to redirect to the intended destination."
However, as of August 25, 2025, any links built with the Google URL shortener in the form of https://goog.gl/* won't return a response.
It'll be a slow death for the service. From August 23, 2024, goo.gl links will show an interstitial page for a percentage of users warning that the link's days are numbered. As the shutdown date nears, that percentage will increase.
Once shutdown happens, the links will simply return a 404 response.
The interstitial links could be a headache in their own right since there is every chance they could interfere with a redirect flow. And this is why Google's advising engineers to transition those goog.gl links as quickly as possible.
But transition them to where? Google's earlier advice to move to FDL might have sounded good in 2018, but the company has since deprecated the functionality, and on August 25, 2025, the service will stop working, alongside the Google URL Shortener.
The challenge facing engineers is tracking down all the places where an affected link might be used; Link Rot – where links that might have once worked but now return a 404 – has become an increasing problem as the World Wide Web has matured. Decisions such as Google's will only serve to make the problem worse.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Ox0000 on Saturday July 20 2024, @09:32PM (6 children)
What actually is the point of these shorteners? I really don't get it. Their main purpose seems to be to redirect victims to malware or phishing sites (i.e. hide the destination). No-one manually enters links anyway, when you get sent them via SMS or e-mail, you just click them, so what's the point of shortening them?
Mind you, one way to prevent phishing and all sorts of other badness is to just blanket NXDOMAIN every single one of these shortener domains.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Saturday July 20 2024, @09:38PM
You've nailed it. Someone sends me a link, I like to copy/paste it into an editor, or maybe directly into the address bar of a browser. If I can't read it, I dismiss it most times. If I'm pretty sure that it's not a malware site, I might try it - but then my browser security options barf on it. "http://crumbly.bit.ly is not a secure site" or "www.devilsanctum is blocked because it has been reported as a malware site". I love my uBlock origin.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 1) by Opyros on Sunday July 21 2024, @01:20AM
I used to use them quite a bit on Usenet. Of course, very little is going on there anymore.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Sunday July 21 2024, @02:52AM
The URL shorteners themselves can perform some level of tracking on you. As an intermediate site they get a copy of the URL you want to visit, the time and IP you tried to use the link, account information about whoever created the link, perhaps even scrape other information from all the tracking info in the long URL that made you need to shorten the damn thing in the first place.
But google already has this information now, so they don't need to provide this service any more.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Sunday July 21 2024, @03:41PM
If you send someone a couple of lines of email (or whatsapp if you are a cool kid) and the email then has four lines of linky goodness (thanks Teams) it can make things a bit unreadable.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Tork on Sunday July 21 2024, @03:42PM
So Amazon URLs can be shared on Twittter.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday July 22 2024, @07:16PM
You can tell a lot about a PR team's attitude by observing that QR codes make the recipient work harder. URL shorteners make the sender work harder. So you can tell whom they think is serving whom, in terms of their values and attitudes.
Ironically nobody really likes either technology and they're both a PITA to use overall.
Before social media "ate the internet", at least from a normie perspective, normies used to visit sites that were not hosted at social media sites so these technologies "made things better" but those days have been over for a decade or two now. No need to manufacture obscure training wheels for the new riders that don't exist anymore.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 20 2024, @09:34PM (4 children)
Maybe stop putting so much shit in the link and you won't need a shortener. It's meant to be an address, not a frigging essay.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Saturday July 20 2024, @11:51PM (2 children)
But if I don't include a sixty character hash of 7 different pieces tracking information, my ad targeting might under very specific circumstances be unable to identify who you are to our malicious and dishonest advertising partners. Can't have that.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by aafcac on Sunday July 21 2024, @03:14AM (1 child)
Pretty much everything that advertising touches is made worse. A lot of that stuff wouldn't even be necessary if they would just target the advertising to the contents on the page. The contents on the page is directly related to what I'm doing now and it's highly unlikely that I'll still be searching to buy something after I've bought it.
What's worse is that because advertisers do things like that, or using the information that javascript provides developers to present the website in a way that looks good on our systems, there's a bunch of stuff related to that which winds up in the URL and if your browser crashes, rather than getting a helpful URL that links you to where you were, you get to start at the top again so that the site gets more opportunities to show ads.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday July 22 2024, @02:05PM
I wrote a journal article about this along with way two mini posts about it.
Advertising destroys everything it ever touches. [soylentnews.org]
The Centauri traded Earth jump gate technology in exchange for our superior hair mousse formulas.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Reziac on Sunday July 21 2024, @02:18AM
Exactly. The only reason I use them at all is because otherwise when I sent someone a link to a Google Map, the link alone is fourteen pages long.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday July 21 2024, @05:15AM
created by the likes of Google to begin with: before web apps, links were naturally short. They were, you know... addresses: http://server/directories/document
Then interactive web pages became a thing and they needed a stateful connection with the server - something HTTP was not designed to provide. The state could be maintained in cookies, passed page after page in POST data (which broke the address but kept it clean) or passed as GET data, which created those giant links people needed shortening. But those pages weren't very common because interactive web pages weren't the norm.
And then they became the norm, even when they weren't really helpful, because the fledgling Big Data industry started to realize interactive websites meant were a perfect way to create walled gardens on the internet, and they could be also be used use to tack on a mountain of trackers to the links to track visitors.
Also, giant unwieldy URLs that deprecate quickly prevented people from easily sharing them, driving them back to the Google search engine. It's mostly this technique that created the need to say to your friend "Just google XYZ and you'll find it": before Google, you could just pass a link to your friend.
That's why link shorteners became needed: Google et al. actually created the need.
I'm guessing they're dropping their link shortening service because it's not really needed anymore: there are other ways to track people right and left on the internet, so the links can be naturally short again, and nobody can share HTTP links to pages inside a proprietary platform anyway. It's just a pragmatic thing to do for Google: they're simply cutting a useless business expense.