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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

#181

Post by nly »

dingnuts wrote: post #176
justin66 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 othe…

Even normal HTTP URLs aren't great. If there was ever a case for content-addressable networks like IPFS it's this. Universities should be able to host this data in a decentralized way.

CANs usually have complex hashy URLs, so you still have the compactness problem

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

#182

Post by andrepd »

SR2Z wrote: post #144
andrepd wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like all that is beyond the point. People used goo.gl because they largely are not tech specialists and aren't really aware of link rot or of a Google decision rendering those links unaccessible.

> People used goo.gl because they largely are not tech specialists and aren't really aware of link rot or of a Google decision rendering those links unaccessible. Anyone who is savvy enough to put a link in a document is well-aware of the fact that links don't work forever, because anyone who has ever clicked a link from a document has encountered a dead link. It's not 2005 anymore, the internet has accumulated plent…

Very much an xkcd.com/2501 situation

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

#184

Post by ycombinatrix »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #178
epolanski wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So he has a computer and can click. In any case a paper should not rely on an ephemeral resource like internet links. Have you ever tried to navigate to the errata corrige of computer science books? It's one single book, with one single link, and it's dead anyway.

I’m unconvinced the researchers acted irresponsibly. If anything, a Google-shortened link looks—at first glance—more reliable than a PDF hosted god knows where. There are always dependencies in citations. Unless a paper comes with its citations embedded, splitting hairs between why one untrustworthy provider is more untrustworthy than another is silly.

The Google shortened link just redirects you to the PDF hosted god knows where...

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

#185

Post by spankalee »

rs186 wrote: post #161
spankalee wrote: post #151

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…

Many good points, but if you don't mind me asking: if you were at Google, would you be willing to be the lead of that archive team, knowing that you'll be stuck at this position for the next 10 years, with the possibility of your team being downsized/eliminated when the wind blows slightly in the other direction?

Definitely a valid question!

Myself, no, for a few reasons: I mainly work on developer tools, I'm too senior for that, and I'm not that interested.

But some people are motivated to work on internet infrastructure, and would be interested. First, you wouldn't be stuck for 10 years. That's not how Google works (and you could of course quit) you're supposed to be with a team a minimum of 18 months, and after that, transfer away. A lot of junior devs don't care that much where they land, the archive team would have to be responsible for more than just the link shortener, so it might be interesting to care for several services from top to bottom. SWEs could be compensated for rotating on to the archive team, and/or it could be part-time.

I think the harder thing is getting management buy-in, even from the front-line managers.

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

#186

Post by gsnedders »

spankalee wrote: post #151

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…

To some extent, it's cases like this which show the real fragility of everything existing as a unified whole in google3.

While clearly maintenance and ownership is still a major problem, one could easily imagine deploying something similar — especially read-only — using GCP's Cloud Run and BigTable products could be less work to maintain, as you're not chasing anywhere near such a moving target.

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

#187

Post by Incipient »

jtuple wrote: post #156
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…

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 jus…

>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.

I just had a really warm feeling of nostalgia reading that! I was a pretty average student, and the material was sometimes dull, but the coffee was nice, life had little stress (in comparison) and everything felt good. I forgot about those times haha. Thanks!

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

#188

Post by bugsMarathon88 »

quesera wrote: post #163
b112 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could deprecate the service, and archive the links as static html. 200bytes of text for an html redirect (not js). You can serve immense volumes of traffic from static html. One hardware server alone could so easily do the job. Your attack surface is also tiny without a back end interpreter. People will chime in with redundancy, but the point is Google could stop maintaining the ingress, and still not be douches…

Exactly. I've seen goo.gl URLs in printed books. Obviously in old blog posts too. And in government websites. Nonprofit communications. Everywhere. Why break this?? Sure, deprecate the service. Add no new entries. This is a good idea anyway, link shorteners are bad for the internet. But breaking all the existing goo.gl URLs seems bizarrely hostile, and completely unnecessary. It would take so little to keep them up.…

> Why break this??

We already told you: people are likely brute-forcing URLs.

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

#189

Post by asdll »

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.

> An absolute act of cultural vandalism.

It makes me mad also, but something we have to learn the hard way is that nothing in this world is permanent. Never, ever depend on any technology to persist. Not even URLs to original hosts should be required. Inline everything.

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

#190

Post by quesera »

fnord77 wrote: post #66

they attempted this in 2018 https://9to5google.com/2018/03/30/google-url-shortener-shut-...

From the 2018 announcement:

> URL Shortener has been a great tool that we’re proud to have built. As we look towards the future, we’re excited about the possibilities of Firebase Dynamic Links

Perhaps relatedly, Google is shutting down Firebase Dynamic Links too, in about a month (2025-08-25).

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