This is just being a poor citizen of the web, no excuses. Google is a 2 trillion dollar company, keeping these links working indefinitely would probably cost less than what they spend on homepage doodles.
Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month
21–30 of 236 posts
Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month
#22About 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.
The web is a crap architecture for permanent references anyway. A link points to a server, not e.g. a content hash.
The simplicity of the web is one of its virtues but also leaves a lot on the table.
Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month
#23About 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.
Jm2c, but if your resource is a link to an online resource that's borderline already (at any point the content can be changed or disappear).
Even worse if your resource is a shortened link by some other service, you've just added yet another layer of unreliable indirection.
Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
It used to be. AdSense came from 20% time!
Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
Alas, it was, once upon a time.
Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month
#26the lesson? never trust industry
Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month
#27Google’s own services generate goo.gl short URLs (Google Maps generates https://maps.app.goo.gl/ URLs for sharing links to map locations), so I assume this shutdown only affects user-generated short URLs. Google’s original announcement doesn’t say as such, but it is carefully worded to specify that short URLs of the “https://goo.gl/* format” will be shut down.
Google’s probably trying to stop goo.gl URLs from being used for phishing, but doesn’t want to admit that publicly.
Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month
#28Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month
#29OMFG - Google should keep these up forever. What a hit to trust. Trust with Google was already bad for everything they killed, this is another dagger.
Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month
#30From 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…
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