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Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month

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Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month

#11

What will it really cost for Google (each year) to host whatever was created, as static files, for as long as possible?

It'd probably cost a couple tens of dollars, and Google is simply too poor to afford that these days. They've spent all their money on AI and have nothing left

Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month

#12
post #2

About 60k academic citations about to die - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=90&q=%22https://goo... Countless books with irrevocably broken references - https://www.google.com/search?q=%22://goo.gl%22&sca_upv=1&sc... And for what? The cost of keeping a few TB online and a little bit of CPU power? An absolute act of cultural vandalism.

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Goo.gl

https://tracker.archiveteam.org/goo-gl/ (1.66B work items remaining as of this comment)

How to run an ArchiveTeam warrior: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior

(edit: i see jaydenmilne commented about this further down thread, mea culpa)

Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month

#13
post #2

About 60k academic citations about to die - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=90&q=%22https://goo... Countless books with irrevocably broken references - https://www.google.com/search?q=%22://goo.gl%22&sca_upv=1&sc... And for what? The cost of keeping a few TB online and a little bit of CPU power? An absolute act of cultural vandalism.

The vandalism was relying on Google.

You'd think people would learn. Ah, well. Hopefully we can do better from lessons learned.

Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month

#16
post #3

From the blog post: "more than 99% of them had no activity in the last month" https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-url-shortener-li... This is a classic product data decision-making fallacy. The right question is "how much total value do all of the links provide", not "what percent are used".

> The right question is "how much total value do all of the links provide", not "what percent are used". Yes, but it doesn't bring in the sweet promotion home, unfortunately. Ironically, if 99% of them doesn't see any traffic, you can scale back the infra, run it in 2 VMs, and make sure a single person can keep it up as a side quest, just for fun (but, of course, pay them for their work). This beancounting really mak…

> just for fun (but, of course, pay them for their work).

Doing things for fun isn't in Google's remit

Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month

#17
post #6

I have only given this a moment's thought, but why not just publish the URL map as a text file or SQLLite DB? So at least we know where they went? I don't think it would be a privacy issue since the links are all public?

Are they all public? Where can I see them?

You can brute force them. They don't have passwords. The point is the only "security" is knowing the short URL.

Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month

#18
post #6

I have only given this a moment's thought, but why not just publish the URL map as a text file or SQLLite DB? So at least we know where they went? I don't think it would be a privacy issue since the links are all public?

It will include many URLs that are semi-private, like Google Docs that are shared via link.

Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month

#19
post #6

I have only given this a moment's thought, but why not just publish the URL map as a text file or SQLLite DB? So at least we know where they went? I don't think it would be a privacy issue since the links are all public?

It will include many URLs that are semi-private, like Google Docs that are shared via link.

So exclude them

Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month

#20
post #6

I have only given this a moment's thought, but why not just publish the URL map as a text file or SQLLite DB? So at least we know where they went? I don't think it would be a privacy issue since the links are all public?

Are they all public? Where can I see them?

I don't think so, but you can find the indexed urls here https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A"goo.gl" it's about 9,6 million links. And those are what got indexed, it should be way more out there
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