211–220 of 236 posts
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Adding an external service so you don’t have to store a few hundred bytes is wild, particularly within a pdf.
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.
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.
For people wanting to include URL references in things like books, what’s the right approach to take today? I’m genuinely asking. It seems like its hard to trust that any service will remaining running for decades
Say the interview of a person, a niche publication, a local pamphlet?
Maybe to certify that your article is of a certain level of credibility you need to manually preserve all the cited works yourself in an approved way.
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> 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.
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.
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)
They are saving pennies but reminding everyone one more time that Google cannot be relied upon.
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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.
What a weird comparison. Do we have the vast majority of paper documents from 1,000 years ago?
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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 you want it archived do it. You seem to want someone else to take up your concerns.
An HN genius should be able to crawl this and fix it.
But you’re not geniuses. They’re too busy to be low affect whiners on social media.
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.
Who's lost out at the end of the day? People who didn't understand the free market and lost access to these "free" services? Or people who knew what would happen and avoided them? My links are still working...
There are digital public goods (like Wikipedia) that are intended to stick around forever with free access, but Google isn't one of them.