- cross-posted to:
- technology@hexbear.net
- cross-posted to:
- technology@hexbear.net
#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.
Good! Sick of link shorteners, 99% of the time I’ve seen them used it’s for tracking and/or disguising the true destination.
They didn’t find a profitable way to put ads in the shortening service
There it is
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…
Google is turning into a blackhole.
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.
URL lengthening will continue as planned.
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.
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.
Remember: never trust google