61–70 of 236 posts
From 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".
Don't be confused! That's not how they made the decision; it's how they're selling it.
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…
other readers may be specifically interested in their contingency plan
https://9to5google.com/2018/03/30/google-url-shortener-shut-...
From 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".
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.
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This sounds like a good project for an intern, with server costs that might be able to exceed a hundred dollars per month!
Cloudflare offered to keep it running and were turned away: https://x.com/elithrar/status/1948451254780526609 Remember this next time you are thinking of depending upon a Google service. They could have kept this going easily but are intentionally breaking it.
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.
Granted that it was a free service and Google is under no obligation to keep it going. But if they were going to be so casual about it, they shouldn't have offered it in the first place. Or perhaps, people should take that lesson instead and spare themselves the pain.