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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

#151

Post by spankalee »

As an ex-Googler, the problem here is clear and common, and it's not the infrastructure cost: it's ownership.

No one wants to own this product.

- The code could be partially frozen, but large scale changes are constantly being made throughout the google3 codebase, and someone needs to be on the hook for approving certain changes or helping core teams when something goes wrong. If a service it uses is deprecated, then lots of work might need to be done.

- Every production service needs someone responsible for keeping it running. Maybe an SRE, thought many smaller teams don't have their own SREs so they manage the service themselves.

So you'd need some team, some full reporting chain all the way up, to take responsibility for this. No SWE is going to want to work on a dead product where no changes are happening, no manager is going to care about it. No director is going to want to put staff there rather than a project that's alive. No VP sees any benefit here - there's only costs and risks.

This is kind of the Reader situation all over again (except for the fact that a PM with decent vision could have drastically improved and grown Reader, IMO).

This is obviously bad for the internet as a whole, and I personally think that Google has a moral obligation to not rug pull infrastructure like this. Someone there knows that critical links will be broken, but it's in no one's advantage to stop that from happening.

I think Google needs some kind of "attic" or archive team that can take on projects like this and make them as efficiently maintainable in read-only mode as possible. Count it as good-will marketing, or spin it off to google.org and claim it's a non-profit and write it off.

Side note: a similar, but even worse situation for the company is the Google Domains situation. Apparently what happened was that a new VP came into the org that owned it and just didn't understand the product. There wasn't enough direct revenue for them, even though the imputed revenue to Workspace and Cloud was significant. They proposed selling it off and no other VPs showed up to the meeting about it with Sundar so this VP got to make their case to Sundar unchallenged. The contract to sell to Squarespace was signed before other VPs who might have objected realized what happened, and Google had to buy back parts of it for Cloud.

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

#152

Post by jeeyoungk »

diatone wrote: post #133
ceejayoz wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me know when you figure out how to make a printed scientific journal clickable.

Take a photo on your phone, OS recognises the link in the image, makes it clickable, done. Or, use a QR code instead

This is the answer; turns out that non-transformed links are the most generic data format, without any "compression" - QR codes or a third-party-intermediary - needed.

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

#153

Post by romaniv »

URL shorteners were always a bad idea. At the rate things are going I'm not sure people in a decade or two won't say the same thing about URLs and the Web as whole. The fact that there is no protocol-level support for archiving, versioning or even client-side replication means that everything you see on the Web right now has an overwhelming probability to permanently disappear in the near future. This is an astounding engineering oversight for something that's basically the most popular communication system and medium in the world and in history.

Also, it's quite conspicuous that 30+ years into this thing browsers still have no built-in capacity to store pages locally in a reasonable manner. We still rely on "bookmarks".

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

#154

Post by SR2Z »

ceejayoz wrote: post #145
SR2Z wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it amusing that you are complaining about not having a computer to click a link while glossing over the fact that you need a computer to use a link at all. This use case of "I have a paper journal and no PDF but a computer with a web browser" seems extraordinarily contrived. I have literally held a single-digit number of printed papers in my entire life while looking at thousands as PDFs. If we cared, we'd use…

> I have literally held a single-digit number of printed papers in my entire life while looking at thousands as PDFs. This is by no means a universal experience. People still get printed journals. Libraries still stock them. Some folks print out reference materials from a PDF to take to class or a meeting or whatnot.

And how many of those people then proceed to type those links into their web browsers, shortened or not?

Sure, contributing to link rot is bad, but in the same way that throwing out spoiled food is bad. Sometimes you've just gotta break a bunch of links.

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

#155

Post by FallCheeta7373 »

gmerc wrote: post #150
jlarocco wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO it's less Google's fault and more a crappy tech education problem. It wasn't a good idea to use shortened links in a citation in the first place, and somebody should have explained that to the authors. They didn't publish a book or write an academic paper in a vacuum - somebody around them should have known better and said something. And really it's not much different than anything else online - it can disappear…

Ahh classic free market cop out.

if the smartest among us publishing for academia cannot figure this out, then who will?

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

#156

Post by jtuple »

SR2Z wrote: post #137
ceejayoz wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the bytes. It's the fact that it's likely gonna be printed in a paper journal, where you can't click the link.

I find it amusing that you are complaining about not having a computer to click a link while glossing over the fact that you need a computer to use a link at all. This use case of "I have a paper journal and no PDF but a computer with a web browser" seems extraordinarily contrived. I have literally held a single-digit number of printed papers in my entire life while looking at thousands as PDFs. If we cared, we'd use…

Perhaps times have changed, but when I was in grad school circa 2010 smartphones and tablets weren't yet ubiquitous but laptops were. It was super common to sit in a cafe/library with a laptop and a stack of printed papers to comb though.

Reading paper was more comfortable then reading on the screen, and it was easy to annotate, highlight, scribble notes in the margin, doodle diagrams, etc.

Do grad students today just use tablets with a stylus instead (iPad + pencil, Remarkable Pro, etc)?

Granted, post grad school I don't print much anymore, but that's mostly due to a change in use case. At work I generally read at most 1-5 papers a day tops, which is small enough to just do on a computer screen (and have less need to annotate, etc). Quite different then the 50-100 papers/week + deep analysis expected in academia.

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

#157

Post by ceejayoz »

SR2Z wrote: post #154
ceejayoz wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have literally held a single-digit number of printed papers in my entire life while looking at thousands as PDFs. This is by no means a universal experience. People still get printed journals. Libraries still stock them. Some folks print out reference materials from a PDF to take to class or a meeting or whatnot.

And how many of those people then proceed to type those links into their web browsers, shortened or not? Sure, contributing to link rot is bad, but in the same way that throwing out spoiled food is bad. Sometimes you've just gotta break a bunch of links.

> And how many of those people then proceed to type those links into their web browsers, shortened or not?

That probably depends on the link's purpose.

"The full dataset and source code to reproduce this research can be downloaded at " might be deeply interesting to someone in a few years.

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

#158

Post by bugsMarathon88 »

edent wrote: post #46
bugsMarathon88 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Gosh! It is a pity Google doesn't hire any smart people who know how to build a throttling system. Still, they're a tiny and cash-starved company so we can't expect too much of them.

It is a business, not a charity. Adjust your expectations accordingly, or expect disappointment.

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

#159

Post by kazinator »

gmerc wrote: post #150
jlarocco wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO it's less Google's fault and more a crappy tech education problem. It wasn't a good idea to use shortened links in a citation in the first place, and somebody should have explained that to the authors. They didn't publish a book or write an academic paper in a vacuum - somebody around them should have known better and said something. And really it's not much different than anything else online - it can disappear…

Ahh classic free market cop out.

Nope! There have in fact been education campaigns about the evils of URL shorteners for years: how they pose security risks (used for shortening malicious URLs), and how they stop working when their domain is temporarily or permanently down.

The authors just had their heads too far up their academic asses to have heard of this.

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

#160

Post by justin66 »

jlarocco wrote: post #147
edent wrote: 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.

IMO it's less Google's fault and more a crappy tech education problem. It wasn't a good idea to use shortened links in a citation in the first place, and somebody should have explained that to the authors. They didn't publish a book or write an academic paper in a vacuum - somebody around them should have known better and said something. And really it's not much different than anything else online - it can disappear…

> It wasn't a good idea to use shortened links in a citation in the first place, and somebody should have explained that to the authors. They didn't publish a book or write an academic paper in a vacuum - somebody around them should have known better and said something.

It's a great idea, and today in 2025, papers are pretty much the only place where using these shortened URLs makes a lot of sense. In almost any other context you could just use a QR code or something, but that wouldn't fit an academic paper.

Their specific choice of shortened URL provider was obviously unfortunate. The real failure is that of DOI to provide an alternative to goo.gl or tinyurl or whatever that is easy to reach for. It's a big failure, since preserving references to things like academic papers is part of their stated purpose.

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