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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

#201

Post by chneu »

esafak wrote: post #61
fizx wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't be confused! That's not how they made the decision; it's how they're selling it.

So how did they decide?

new person got hired after old person left. new person says "we can save x% by shutting down these links. 99% arent used" and the new boss that's only been there for 6 months says "yeah sure".

Why does google kill any project? the people who made it moved on, the new people dont care because it doesn't make their resume look any better.

basically nobody wants to own this service and it requires upkeep to maintain it alongside other google services.

google's history shows a clear choice to reward new projects, not old ones.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

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

#202

Post by chneu »

localtoast wrote: post #47
jaydenmilne wrote: post #4

ArchiveTeam is trying to brute force the entire URL space before its too late. You can run a Virtualbox VM/docker image (ArchiveTeam Warrior) to help (unique IPs are needed). I've been running it for a couple months and found a million. https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior

Docker container FTW. Thanks for the heads-up - this is a project I will happily throw a Hetzner server at.

im about to go setup my spare n100 just for this project. If all it uses is a lil bandwidth then that's perfect for my 10gbps fiber and n100.

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

#203

Post by chneu »

DominikPeters wrote: post #18
jedberg wrote: post #6

I have only given this a moment's thought, but why not just publish the URL map as a text file or SQLLite DB? So at least we know where they went? I don't think it would be a privacy issue since the links are all public?

It will include many URLs that are semi-private, like Google Docs that are shared via link.

That's not any better than what archiveteam is doing. They're brute forcing the URLs to capture all of them. So privacy won't really matter here.

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

#204

Post by chneu »

Alifatisk wrote: post #20
devrandoom wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they all public? Where can I see them?

I don't think so, but you can find the indexed urls here https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A"goo.gl" it's about 9,6 million links. And those are what got indexed, it should be way more out there

archiveteam has the list at over 2billion urls with over a billion left to archive.

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

#205

Post by chneu »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #5

What will it really cost for Google (each year) to host whatever was created, as static files, for as long as possible?

it's not the cost of hosting/sharing it. It's the cost employing people to maintain this alongside other google products.

So, at minimum, assuming there are 2 people maintaining this at google that probably means it would cost them $250k/yr in just payroll to keep this going. That's probably a very low ball estimate on the people involved but it still shows how expensive theses old products can be.

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

#206

Post by chneu »

christophilus wrote: post #131
xutopia wrote: post #110

Google is making harder and harder to depend on their software.

That’s a good thing from my perspective. I wish they’d crush YouTube next. That’s the only Google IP I haven’t been able to avoid.

The alternatives just aren't there, either. Nebula is okay but not great. Floatplane is too exclusive. Vimeo..okay.

But maybe a youtube disruption would be good for video on the internet. or it might be bad. idk.

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

#207

Post by chneu »

ourmandave wrote: post #15

A comment said they stopped making new links and announced back in 2018 it would be going away. I'm not a google fanboi and the google graveyard is a well known thing, but this has been 6+ years coming.

I just went through the old thread and it's comments. It appears google didn't specifically state they were going to end the service. They hinted that links would continue working, but new ones would not be able to be created. It was left a bit open-ended, and that likely made people think the links would work indefinitely.

This seems to be echoed by the archiveteam scrambling to get this archived. I figure they would have backed these up years ago if it was more well known.

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

#208

Post by chneu »

quesera wrote: post #190
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).

Thanks for pointing this out. That's hilarious.

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

#209

Post by addandsubtract »

pentagrama wrote: post #136
toomuchtodo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Goo.gl https://tracker.archiveteam.org/goo-gl/ (1.66B work items remaining as of this comment) How to run an ArchiveTeam warrior: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior (edit: i see jaydenmilne commented about this further down thread, mea culpa)

Thank you for that information! I wanted to help and did that using VMware. For curious people, here is what the UI looks like, you have a list of projects to choose, I choose the goo.gl project, and a "Current project" tab which shows the project activity. Project list: https://imgur.com/a/peTVzyw Current project: https://imgur.com/a/QVuWWIj

Also available as a docker file, for those not running VMs: https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/warrior-dockerfile

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

#210

Post by addandsubtract »

chneu wrote: post #202
localtoast wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Docker container FTW. Thanks for the heads-up - this is a project I will happily throw a Hetzner server at.

im about to go setup my spare n100 just for this project. If all it uses is a lil bandwidth then that's perfect for my 10gbps fiber and n100.

Doing the same, even though I'm worried Google will throw even more captchas at me now, than before.
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