Google Unveils goo.gl URL Shortening Service 242
eldavojohn writes "The Sultan of Search is unveiling a new service (currently only available for Google Toolbar and Feedburner) that will tackle a very old problem usually solved by bit.ly or tinyurl — URL shortening. Now, we've heard cries for sanity to prevent potential issues (like what if tr.im had shut down and broken millions of links?) but with one of the goliaths of the industry jumping in the ring it looks like URL shortening is here to stay. And a quick note for people who enjoy privacy, goo.gl explicitly states: 'Please note that Google may choose to publicly display aggregate and non-personally identifiable statistics about particular shortened links, such as the number of end user clicks.' You didn't think Google was going to sit back and let bit.ly harvest juicy data on 2.1 billion links that were clicked in November without trying to corner some of that action to make their ad suggestions more accurate, did you?" Google's shortening service is called Goo.gl.
You guys missed one tiny, important detail... (Score:4, Informative)
"Google URL Shortener is currently available for Google products and not for broader consumer use."
Re:You guys missed one tiny, important detail... (Score:3, Informative)
"Google URL Shortener is currently available for Google products and not for broader consumer use."
That would be in the first sentence of the summary (don't worry, it's only natural not to RTFS):
(currently only available for Google Toolbar and Feedburner)
Decenturl still rocks (Score:3, Informative)
People are obsessed with shortening as much as possible, but I like meaningful URLs that tell me about the contents that's linked to.
http://decenturl.com/ does the job perfectly: http://search.slashdot.decenturl.com/google-url-shortening-service
Re:Wouldn't be necessary if... (Score:3, Informative)
thats not only for search engines.
It's really handy to see where a link is going!
Re:Is this really a problem? (Score:2, Informative)
Long links in twitter messages significantly reduce the amount of available characters.
Root cause analysis. This is a "solution" to a problem that shouldn't exist anyway. Use hyperlinks. Others have only been doing it for years now.
Re:Google Gibraltar (Score:4, Informative)
I hope you mean What Goo Greenland looks like.
Google Gibraltar would be google.gi
Re:They do? (Score:5, Informative)
Quite how popping up a page stating the service was busy is any easier than just issuing a redirect to the required site I don't really know
Issuing a redirect to the right place requires access to the database, issueing an error message does not.
P.S. if you are running a website please help reduce the need for url shorteners by using sensible urls.
Re:Other services work fine (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Preview url (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Google Gibraltar (Score:1, Informative)
.gl is Greenland. Gibraltar is .gi.
Re:Wouldn't be necessary if... (Score:3, Informative)
Good URIs [w3.org] are just a good idea, period. That's not advice from some shady SEO scumbag, either. That's tim berners-lee and the w3c.
Surely:
http://example.com/articles/man-bites-dog [example.com]
is vastly superior from the user's point of view to:
http://example.com/cgi-bin/article.php3?PHPSESSID=0983sdf0er888fsd&article_id=73522 [example.com]
Which one are you going to remember? Which one would you rather read over the phone?
Re:Is this really a problem? (Score:3, Informative)
This will tell you: http://preview.tinyurl.com/yew8dpl [tinyurl.com]
Re:Is this really a problem? (Score:4, Informative)
You can also set a cookie at tinyurl.com that will remember you prefer to preview your URLs.