Google shifts goo.gl policy: Inactive links deactivated, active links preserved

Post by Hammershaft » Sat, Aug 02, 2025, 1:00 AM UTC

zdragnar wrote: post #139

hackernudes wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is famously a monorepo and is basically the gold standard of CI/CD. What does happen is APIs are constantly upgraded and rewritten and deprecated. Eventually projects using the deprecated APIs need to be upgraded or dropped. I don't really understand why developers LOVE to deprecate shit that has users but it's a fact of life. Second hand info about Google only so take it with a grain of salt.

Simple: you don't get promoted for maintaining legacy stuff. You do get promoted for providing something new that people adopt. As such, developing a new API gets more brownie points than rebuilding a service that does a better job of providing an existing API. To be more charitable, having learned lessons from an existing API, a new one might incorporate those lessons learned and be able to do a better job serving v…

Post by bapak » Sat, Aug 02, 2025, 2:12 AM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #79

londons_explore wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the concern is someone might scan all the inactive links and find that some of them link to secret URL's, leak design details about how things are built, link to documents shared 'anyone with the link' permission, etc.

> I think the concern is someone might scan all the inactive links How? Barring a database leak I don't see a way for someone to simply scan all the links. Putting something like Cloudflare in front of the shortener with a rate limit would prevent brute force scanning. I assume google semi-competently made the shortener (using a random number generator) which would make it pretty hard to find links in the first place…

Post by Wicher » Sat, Aug 02, 2025, 2:21 AM UTC

xp84 wrote: post #90

babypuncher wrote: post #82

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I think it would be easy for these services to audit their link database and cull any that have had dead endpoints for more than 12 months. That would come off far less user hostile than this move while still achieving the goal of trimming truly unnecessary bloat from their database. It also doesn't require you to keep track of how often a link is followed, which incurs its own small cost.

> cull any that have had dead endpoints That actually seems just as bad to me, since the URL often has enough data to figure out what was being pointed to even if the exact URL format of a site has changed or even if a site has gone offline. It might be like: kmart dot com / product.aspx?SKU=12345678&search_term=Staplers or /products/swingline-red-stapler-1235467890 Those URLs would now be dead and kmart itself will…

Post by notpushkin » Sat, Aug 02, 2025, 2:39 AM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #75

SoftTalker wrote: post #22

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Any form of URL is at best a point in time reference. Shortened or not, they change, disappear, get redirected, all the time. There was once an idea that a URL was (or should be) a permanent reference, but to the extent that was ever true it's long in the past. The closest thing we might have to that is an Internet Archive link. Otherwise, don't cite URLs. Cite authors, titles, keywords, and dates, and maybe a search…

Cite Wayback Machine links, as you mention.

Post by Uehreka » Sat, Aug 02, 2025, 2:41 AM UTC