#killedbygoogle
- Google’s URL shortening service goo.gl links will stop working on August 25th, 2025, resulting in 404 errors.
- Starting August 23rd, 2024, goo.gl links will show an interstitial page warning users of the upcoming shutdown.
- Google initially suggested migrating to Firebase Dynamic Links (FDL), which has also since been deprecated.
I’m sure many people chose this one over other shortners because they assumed it would outlast the others. 🤦♀️
So many links are going to go dead because of this. I’m sure plenty of software out there used this to automatically shorten links for posting on social media etc.
So many chunks of internet history is going straight to the bin thanks to this.
Remember: never trust google
Archive.org offering to step in and help if google will hand over the domain and db
Which they probably won’t…
Of course not. Google would never give up that domain. Especially not if there is no money in it for them.
Virgin Google vs Chad Archive.org
They didn’t find a profitable way to put ads in the shortening service
There it is
Good! Sick of link shorteners, 99% of the time I’ve seen them used it’s for tracking and/or disguising the true destination.
It was cool back when there were valid reasons for character limitations. But I agree, url obfuscation was often used for less savory reasons.
And I’m not sure how shorteners work for Firefox’s tracking removal, but I’m guessing not well.
If they just released the db, I think there are be many who’d be happy to host the service. But knowing Google, they probably won’t do shit.
That could probably cause more trouble that it’s worth.
The Internet Archive could archive them forever.
Archiveteam has had a project trying to archive all of them they’ve seen for a few years now. https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/URLTeam
How would that work if Google could the domain? Or are you saying they’d release the domain as well?
I don’t expect that. It should be trivial to have a redirect addon.
Google shuts down a lot of things, and usually there is nothing to do and parts of the internet break forever. But…I feel like this is one that would be cheap and at least possible to mitigate without Google’s help.
Crawl for all goo.gl links prior to the 2025 shutdown, cache and enter the link and the redirect link into a database, and create a simple open source in-line replacement extension for browsers that intercepts goo.gl links and replaces them with the real link. These are just URLs, so the database even for hundreds of thousands of entries shouldn’t be huge.
I mean, I’m not going to do it, but…
the database even for hundreds of thousands of entries shouldn’t be huge
Hundreds of thousands of entries would be negligible (at 1000 bytes average per entry, 500k entries would be half a gigabyte) but the issue is that a full archive would be around 36 billion entries (making that archive around 34 TB, but probably smaller because the average link size is likely much lower than 1000 characters).
Interesting - how do we know it’s 36 billion entries? I just estimated that it hadn’t been used that much based on almost never seeing anyone actually use it…
I don’t know for sure, but that’s the scale I would expect (billions) and the number came from https://www.seroundtable.com/google-goo-gl-urls-to-404-37758.html
Ah, yes, I’m off by a lot then, thanks!
Noticed that in Apple’s iOS Shortcuts Gallery they featured a shortcut that uses v.gd or is.gd - apparently both run by an ISP, Memset.
Cloud hosting company Memset this morning [April 26, 2010] announced that it has agreed to acquire URL shortening service Is.gd. Memset in a statement says it has thus secured the URL shortener’s future, and added that it plans to maintain it as a non-advertising-supported, free Internet service indefinitely.
Good Guy Memset. Must be tons of hassle given the spam/fraud.
Google is turning into a blackhole.
URL lengthening will continue as planned.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
If you ever used Google’s URL shortening service goo.gl before it was shut down in 2019, be warned — those links will stop working on August 25th, 2025.
Google announced in a blog post that “the time has come to turn off the serving portion of Google URL Shortener” and that any links in the https://goo.gl/* format will respond with a 404 error next year.
Ahead of the shutdown, goo.gl links will start showing an interstitial page on August 23rd, 2024, notifying users that “this link will no longer work in the near future.” This message will initially appear for a “percentage of existing links,’’ which will increase as the deadline draws closer.
Google is encouraging developers to update impacted links as soon as possible, however, as this interstitial page may cause disruptions to link redirections.
When Google announced in 2018 that it was shutting down goo.gl, the company encouraged developers to migrate to Firebase Dynamic Links (FDL) — which has also since been deprecated.
The original article contains 165 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 0%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Saved %0🤔
Wait, people outside Google were allowed to use it? Huh, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that in the wild.
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Initially everybody could use them, then they just closed the service but the links kept working.
TIL Google had a URL shortener.
