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

Post by quesera » Sat, Jul 26, 2025, 3:11 AM UTC

bugsMarathon88 wrote: post #188

quesera wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by hammyhavoc » Sat, Jul 26, 2025, 5:51 AM UTC

FallCheeta7373 wrote: post #155

gmerc wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh classic free market cop out.

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

Post by eviks » Sat, Jul 26, 2025, 6:48 AM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #171

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…

This kind of luddite behavior sometimes makes using this site exhausting. We have many paper documents from over 1,000 years ago. The vast majority of what was on the internet 25 years ago is gone forever.

Post by bunbun69 » Sat, Jul 26, 2025, 8:45 AM UTC

Post by spixy » Sat, Jul 26, 2025, 10:02 AM UTC

SirMaster wrote: post #135

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.

Can't someone just go through programmatically right now and build a list of all these links and where they point to? And then put up a list somewhere that everyone can go look up if they need to?