Google's goo․gl links will stop working in August 2025

How much work is it really to keep goo.gl links around?

A lot.

Goo.gl has a namespace for 10 billion entries, it used to keep tracking/analytics data for each link, with a user interface, and it would happily generate them for links to internal stuff.

Just keeping it running would take some containers of server racks, plus updating the security, accounting for changing web standards, and so on.

Keep in mind this isn't some self-hosted url shortener with less than a million entries and a peak of 10K users/second, that you can slap onto a random server and keep it going. It's a multiple orders of magnitude larger beast, requiring a multi-server architecture just to keep the database, plus more of the same for the analytics, admin interface... and users will expect it to return a result in a fraction of a second, worldwide.

Yeah, shouldn't be too hard to at least keep the existing links working in a read only state.

Another one for the graveyard!

I have probably saved hundreds of links from such a fate in my org. People there use them for everything even though the media they're using them in allows them to be clicked (e.g. they're not going out to print where someone has to type them in).

Thankfully, I'm in a position to un-shorten them before they get published. lol

The Jedis are going to feel this one

Switch to Proton, Linux, Librewolf, Matrix, Gimp and Libreoffice.

Don't rely on any company keeping a service running unless you've got a contract with them

LOL¹⁰⁰

Googlel

Used instead of lol; when you're too dank for lol

- https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Lel

URL shorteners in general, or just Google?

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/URLTeam

Goo.gl has a namespace for 10 billion entries, it used to keep tracking/analytics data for each link, with a user interface, and it would happily generate them for stuff like Google Maps links.

How much money would you say it takes to even maintain a system like that, plus update its security, not to mention account for changing web standards, at that scale?

Oh, the CEO's pay is secure from day one of the fiscal year. They're trying to pay the cleaning staff with this.

Disclaimer: I don't use any google services myself.

Because it is free, guaranteed to work as long as they keep it running and marketed well.

Plus since they were early into the game of tech online they have many services that all link together.

There aren't many that will offer most users so much value for 'free'.

Most alternatives will have some cost if you want as much space as google provides, either the same as google (user data) or monetary (which I semi agree with, hosting isn't free and I'd rather pay money than with data). However, not everyone is in a position to pay with money and so data is usually what they pay with.

Anyone could generate them, for free, and they came with analytics on the side. Google also generated them for sharing content from their services.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_URL_Shortener

I'd assume that Google's value -- as with other link-shortening companies -- came from being able to add information tracking whenever someone clicked on that link.

If you mean customer value, might be formats where people had limited space to include links like traditional Twitter (which was originally 140 characters in a post, whereas URLs have no specification-mandated character limit).

Could do similar things like adding a +resume to your email link