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The URL shortener situation is out of control

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Re: The URL shortener situation is out of control

#61

Post by dragonwriter »

garethadams wrote: post #45
dragonwriter wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The server might not know the long URL since all that t.co knows about is the slate.me URL The server at t.co could send a request (HEAD works) to slate.me, and follow up any redirects it gets to resolve the final URL. (This could be done just by following until no more redirects, or only sending requests to known URL shorteners -- there's advantages and disadvantages to both) -- and you don't need any new HTTP ver…

That assumes that every user gets the same "long" URL for a particular "short" URL (and that every 30x corresponds to a short-to-long redirect). It falls down where a URL depends on geolocation or time sensitivity.

The alternative I presented of only follow redirects from known URL shorteners addresses pretty much all of that.

Re: The URL shortener situation is out of control

#62

Post by chii »

Eridrus wrote: post #57
narsil wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would result in marketers returning 200 responses to set the cookie and render a page with javascript that sets `window.location` instead, which would be even slower.

I think this is worth hammering home. People want analytics information, and the only way we can do this now is by adding things like this. (Not strictly true, but ease of deployment, etc). Unless you shut down the only way to do something, the people who want this service will work around whatever restrictions have been put in place, and the solution we get will probably be even uglier. The real way to get rid of th…

the problem is that these analytics are only beneficial to the owners or advertisers, which means if there's a way for users to turn off the supposed capability, then the advertisers would find a different way to do it, which results in much the same thing as today.

it's a social problem, not a technological one imho.

Re: The URL shortener situation is out of control

#63

Post by alttab »

mmahemoff wrote: post #18

That's really unfortunate. And it's not just performance, it really messes around with OS-level URL handling protocols like Android intents (and possibly FB's app links and iOS's new Extensibility). I recently found this happening with Twitter's Android app. The user sees a link to player.fm and thinks it will open the native Player FM app if they have it installed, since it's registered to handle that URL pattern. B…

Prefetching the URL will trash analytics, which is why most of this is really done. Its not like the short URLs are easier to copy/paste, or remember.

Re: The URL shortener situation is out of control

#64

Post by RazorCrusade »

I've lived in the Philippines for awhile, and the big telcom here, PLDT, has terrible DNS. t.co links are the most obvious point of contention, where they just won't resolve 90% of the time. It's incredibly obnoxious, especially on a mobile device where DNS settings aren't (easily) exposed.

Re: The URL shortener situation is out of control

#67

Post by unclebucknasty »

sukuriant wrote: post #7
lyndonh wrote: post #5

People are using shorteners on shortened links, this is the problem. The most obvious one is Twitter, always using it's own service regardless.

My guess would be for analytics, so it knows how its own service is being used and who is accessing websites through it. It comes with a convenient feature that bad URLs can be taken down on its site.

Genuinely curious: How does it take down bad URLs? And, by "bad", are we talking about 404s?

Re: The URL shortener situation is out of control

#68

Post by unclebucknasty »

chadgeidel wrote: post #30
whalesalad wrote: post #25

Is the ridiculously long ThisURLShortenerSituationIsOfficiallyOutOfControl.aspx url part of the rant against short urls?

I'm no SEO guru, but isn't the recommended behavior to create a URL that matches the title of the blog post? I've seen these "post title" URLs with increasing frequency over the past few years.

Yeah, at least at one time, and likely still the case.

I never liked this SEO "feature", however. My thinking is why should search engines really care about the URL WRT content? Seems like a shortcoming of the engines, as well as a potential technique for gaming the search engines. In fact, it seems that if search engines could determine that URLs were being used to game them, then they wouldn't need sites to bother with this behavior in the first place. OTOH, if search engines cannot tell they are being gamed with URLs, then it's also completely useless.

What am I missing?

Re: The URL shortener situation is out of control

#69

Post by cezary »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #41

A little off topic, but I seem to recall seeing, probably some years ago, a post on HN about someone a reversable url shortening algorithm that could convert from the shortened url back to the original. Can't find it now, anyone recall this, or did I dream it?

curl -I -L will follow redirects

There's also this service that expands shortened urls: http://longurl.org/

Re: The URL shortener situation is out of control

#70

Post by rhizome »

RobotCaleb wrote: post #65
rhizome wrote: post #26

Closely related, e.g. Photobucket: http://imgur.com/xlWAUdF

I have zero clue what I'm looking at. And I think I'm okay with that.

They are all of the Photobucket web site's third-party javascript dependencies, along with a huge list of external js loaded by just one of those dependencies.
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