Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Shortest URLs on the Internet

jameswillia.ms

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 208 posts

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#51

Post by seedless-sensat »

Macha wrote: post #47
shpx wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At Google and many other tech companies, internal machines are configured to have go/ work just like you describe. Looks like someone even made a whole company around it https://www.golinks.com/blog/go-links-history/

A problem with this approach is browsers love to resolve it to http://go.com , so Disney may be getting a feed of what Googlers are interested in.

I have found Chrome more willing to resolve go/foo as a web search. As a result, the Google autocomplete suggestions for terms like "go/m" are pretty amusing

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#52

Post by bdn_ »

TakeBlaster16 wrote: post #41
bdn_ wrote: post #11

At one point of time, ` http://to ` resolved to a "It works!" page [1]. I've always thought it would be cool to have a URL shortener with links such as ` https://to/library ` or something similar. Oh, how much fun running your own TLD would be... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150319211308/http://to/

I bought the punycode domain {emoji_rabbit}.to (i.e. "hop to") intending to build a url shortner. But I never did anything with it and let it expire. And now it doesn't seem like .to even lets you buy emoji domains anymore. I kind of wish I had held on to it.

I can confirm that emoji domains for `.to` are still supported, I believe most of them are taken by now, though. You can use https://register.to to check.

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#54

Post by bdn_ »

varun_ch wrote: post #43
KMnO4 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google actually serves a bunch of pages through their TLD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.google

Google Search is actually a useful way to find sites on a TLD: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agoogle https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agle https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agoog

This works with DuckDuckGo as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32473643

You can combine the exclusion `-` syntax with this as well. If you want to find different sites on the TLD `.test` but only URLs on `home.test` are being shown, you can use this search:

site:test -site:home.test

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#56

Post by _8j50 »

aka.ms is short but probably not thr shortest, but I would say it is the shortest most popular url possibly. For those who don't know, that is MS's link shortner for official URLs

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#57

Post by matttpt »

> Some have A records pointing to the root servers. I’m not sure why this is - I think it might be because no DNS has been configured in the TLD zone for these TLDs.

I was also curious about this. It turns out that it's because dig interprets some TLDs as DNS record types (MD, MG, MR, MX) or DNS classes (IN and CH) of the same name! Not sure why, but when given only a type or class (without a domain name), dig actually queries for a list of the root servers, which explains the strange results. Looks like using the -q option to specify the domain name works around this.

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#58

Post by dehrmann »

mtmail wrote: post #46
dehrmann wrote: post #16

Any FTP urls? I'm sure there are protocols with shorter schemes, but FTP is still semi-supported.

No longer supported by Firefox, Edge or Chrome https://www.zdnet.com/article/now-firefox-has-dropped-suppor...

Still works on IE! Why my Windows 10 installation has an unsupported copy of IE is another question.

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#59

Post by TakeBlaster16 »

bdn_ wrote: post #52
TakeBlaster16 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought the punycode domain {emoji_rabbit}.to (i.e. "hop to") intending to build a url shortner. But I never did anything with it and let it expire. And now it doesn't seem like .to even lets you buy emoji domains anymore. I kind of wish I had held on to it.

I can confirm that emoji domains for `.to` are still supported, I believe most of them are taken by now, though. You can use https://register.to to check.

Huh, looks like you're right. I distinctly remember getting an error for emoji domains but not normal ones. I might have made an incorrect assumption from that. Either way I've accepted I'm never getting that domain back.

Re: Shortest URLs on the Internet

#60

Post by georgyo »

johnasmith wrote: post #29
bdn_ wrote: post #11

At one point of time, ` http://to ` resolved to a "It works!" page [1]. I've always thought it would be cool to have a URL shortener with links such as ` https://to/library ` or something similar. Oh, how much fun running your own TLD would be... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150319211308/http://to/

I wrote myself a Chrome extension that does this, using http://l/foo style links, and using Chrome's sync to share across devices. Works well enough but limited to desktops. Some large orgs maintain internal shorteners, like http://go links at Google.

Using DHCP to send a DNS search path can make this work across a lan, which is how it works in most work environments.

If you set your dns search path to example.com then http://go would resolve to go.example.com which could be your link shortner.

Post reply on HN