Google URL Shortener links will no longer be available

The original 2018 announcement they link to said:

> While most features of goo.gl will eventually sunset, all existing links will continue to redirect to the intended destination.

And

> After March 30, 2019, all links will continue to redirect to the intended destination.

[Emphasis in original, in bold!]

It is hard to read this as anything but saying the continued serving of redirects will _not_ eventually sunset, right? While most features will eventually sunset, all existing links are not most features, and will continue to redirect.

Clearly they changed their mind. I mean, it's not shocking, especially from Google.

It would be decent and transparent of them to admit it though. Yeah, we said that we were going to continue to redirect existing links, we changed our mind, sorry about that.

How much would it cost Google to just keep a few hundred webserver replicas running on some Borg cluster somewhere that do nothing but match and redirect incoming requests to their destinations for a few more years?

Am I underestimating the complexity of this at Google's scale?

Critical article from Apr 2009:

on url shorteners -- joshua schachter's blog http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners

Print publishers might have a case for URL shorteners but they should own and maintain their own instead of a 3rd party service they can’t control or prevent from disappearing.

Plenty of articles in the Communications of the ACM magazine use 3rd party shortened URLs and it’s unacceptable. They should know better and should host their own link shortener via their digital library system.

I remember when Tweeple were inventing hashtags and retweets in Twitter textboxes, bit.ly was the saviour that prevented url deadweight taking up our precious 140 characters. If 2010 Twitter allowed [markdown urls](https://example.com/longlonglonglonglonglonglonglongurl) and counted only the visible words, maybe the entire link shortener industry would have died off.

From a security perspective, this is a good idea. People intuitively trust Google links. URL shorteners hide what you're clicking on. Sometimes even informed people click on links.

I guess googlers can't really design a reliable link shortener after all.

Late to the discussion but as a former Googler I'm embarrassed for the company they didn't figure out a way to keep these working forever. They really just don't give a damn over there any more, do they?

My dumb architecture suggestion for long term resilience: replace it all with absolutely static HTML files with a redirect in them in meta tags and Javascript (and HTML). Ugly but can be served forever on anything that can serve a web page.

just out of curiosity I wanted to check whether I had some goo.gl links that I might want to migrate but apparently goo.gl now redirects to this announcement.

Would be happy to know if there is a way to access goo.gl links created while logged in with my account.

Normally a product shutdown has a contained set of affected users, but this (incredibly computationally simple) service getting turned off will linkrot a noticeable fraction of the internet. This is shittier than usual.

"We understand the transition away from using goo.gl short links may cause some inconvenience." ... Hum, ya ... Non tech people might have made lots of links in legacy internal doc's, email conversations and other reference maternal ... Maybe even a thing called "Paper" ;-)

I guess it's time to post the perennial reminder that Cool URIs Don't Change: https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

Another one for the Google Graveyard I guess. Feels like everything outside of a few core products is either being shut down or abandoned these days...

Seriously? I can't imagine a service that just returns HTTP 301 is costing Google enough to warrant shutting it down.

Just making a whole slew of links across the whole internet dead. Another cancelled google service on the pile, I guess.

This is not the same Google anymore...