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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

#231

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)

For those in the now, is this heavy on disk usage? Should I install this on my disk drive or my SSD? Just want to avoid tons of disk writes on an SSD if it's unnecessary.

no, seems to download entirely into memory. Moderate CPU usage on this i7 Macbook Air.

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

#232
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://perma.cc/ It is built for the task, and assuming worse case scenario of sunset, it would be ingested into the Wayback Machine. Note that both the Internet Archive and Cloudflare are supporting partners (bottom of page). ( https://doi.org/ is also an option, but not as accessible to a casual user; the DOI Foundation pointed me to https://www.crossref.org/ for adhoc DOI registration, although I have not had tim…

> Websites change. Perma Links don’t.

Until the Cocos Islands are annexed by Australia.

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

#233
post #156
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…

But in that case you have no computer to type the link into even if you wanted to.

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

#234
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.

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…

>"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"

???

DOI and ORCID sponsored link-shortening with Goo.gl. Authors did what they were told would be optimal, and ORCID was probably told by Google that it'd hone its link-shortening service for long-term reliability. What a crazy victim-blame.

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

#235

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)

They appear to be doing ~37k items per minute, with 1.6B remaining that is roughly 30 days left. So that's just barely enough to do it in time. Going to run the warrior over the weekend to help out a bit.

7 days later and they're down to 1.2B remaining!

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

#236
post #161

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?

Does maintaining a frozen service like this[1] really require a team with a leader? I get that someone need to know the service and do maintenance when necessary, but surely that wouldn't be much more than a 20% position or something? At least if some ground work is done to make the now simplified[2] service simpler to run.

[1] Almost the simplest possible services (sans the scale I guess) you can imagine except simple static webpages

[2] The original product included some sort of traffic counter, etc. IIRC

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