Once again we are informed that Google cannot be trusted with data in the long term.
Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month
41–50 of 236 posts
Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month
#42I 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?
I'd rather see it as a searchable database, which I would think is super cheap and no maintenance for Google, and avoids these privacy issues. You can input a known goo.gl and get it's real URL, but can't just list everything out.
And then output the search results as a 302 redirect and it would just be continuing the service.
Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month
#43I don't really get it, it must cost peanuts to leave a static map like this up for the rest of Google's existence as a company.
Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month
#44About 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 act of vandalism occurs when someone creates a shortened URL, not when they stop working.
Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month
#45From 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…
Configuring a static set of redirects would take a couple hours to set up, and literally zero maintenance forever.
Amazon should volunteer a free-tier EC2 instance to help Google in their time of economic struggles.
Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month
#46About 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.
[flagged]
Gosh! It is a pity Google doesn't hire any smart people who know how to build a throttling system.
Still, they're a tiny and cash-starved company so we can't expect too much of them.
Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month
#47ArchiveTeam 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.
Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month
#48About 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
Real URL and save the website in the Internet Archive as it was on the date of access?
Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month
#49ArchiveTeam 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
Thanks for sharing this. I've often felt that the ease by which we can erase digital content makes our time period susceptible to a digital dark ages to archaeologists studying history a few thousand years from now.
Us preserving digital archives is a good step. I guess making hard copies would be the next step.
Re: Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month
#50At least they didn't release a 2 new competing d.uo or re.ad, etc shorteners and expect you to migrate