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.
Is this really a problem? (Score:3, Interesting)
In the days(read decades) of "cut and paste", I really fail to see the real need for URL shortening, other than maybe sending a nice link to a goatse mirror to an unaware "friend" at work.
Sorry, it's kitschy at best. And no, it doesn't "unclutter" jack shit. Learn to insert a damn hyperlink within your text already(yet another decade-old solution to this non-problem). Most input these days is HTML friendly anyway.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
I find them highly irritating because they do hide the real URL. I'd much rather have multiple copy and pastes with a long URL that has been broken across multiple lines. Since moving from text only email and giving up on the spamfest Usenet though, I can't say long URLs have really been much of a problem for me.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
They're a lot easier to read out over the phone, for one - especially if you're deep linking into a site. Seen the URL that points to this article, for instance?
Re:Preview url (Score:3, Interesting)
There are common alternatives, someone just needs to write the plugin. ChromeMUSE [google.com] (which I patched an improvement for [slashdot.org] for my own use) uses LongURL.org to do its replacement. If you want to stick with Firefox then all you need is someone to write a wrapper around that (and for LongURL.org to keep updating their list of supported sites with all of these other sites people make).
Re:Wouldn't be necessary if... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes.. but with most CMS, the other option would be, short, unreadable URL with or without bit.ly.
As most CMS tend create urls like http://www.foobar.example/index.php?articleid=51243 [www.foobar.example] thats not much different from http://www.bit.ly.example/51234 [bit.ly.example] (less special charackters like ? or = that people might mess up, but besides that...)
http://www.foobar.example/Never-gonna-give-you-up [www.foobar.example] is much more informative for human readers. Espescially if you have a list of URLs (history or proxy log) that link to the same site, you'll be glad for having the article caption in the URL.
Say, your friends mailed you several links over the past few weeks.
http://www.foobar.example/index.php?articleid=51243 [www.foobar.example]
http://www.foobar.example/index.php?articleid=28043 [www.foobar.example]
http://www.foobar.example/index.php?articleid=79344 [www.foobar.example]
http://www.foobar.example/index.php?articleid=97421 [www.foobar.example]
http://www.foobar.example/index.php?articleid=12034 [www.foobar.example]
Would you be able to see which one was the good one? Much easier with
http://www.foobar.example/Never-gonna-give-you-up [www.foobar.example]
http://www.foobar.example/Natalie-Portman-in-Leia-Slave-Dress [www.foobar.example]
http://www.foobar.example/boring_surveillance [www.foobar.example]
http://www.foobar.example/Goatse-the-movie [www.foobar.example]
http://www.foobar.example/Rickrolling [www.foobar.example]
But you were right. A CMS with a good SEF-URL-Scheme should try to be as tense as those examples. http://www.foobar.example/Natalie-Portman/index.php?sessid=uj99346Ab320ljkldjf&user=woheverwaslookingitup&page=3&find=in-Leia-Slave-Dress&showads=true [www.foobar.example] unites the worst of two worlds.
P.S.
I tried my best to explain to slashdot that these aren't actual urls.
Re:Wouldn't be necessary if... (Score:3, Interesting)
But, website operators that aren't idiots don't change URLs.
Yes they do. Everyone does it. Nobody likes to do it, but inevitably it eventually happens to some pages.
Not everyone does it. Tim Berners-Lee doesn't [w3.org]. If you need to give an article a new URL because you've changed CMSs, or for some other reason, put in a redirect to send people accessing the old URL to the new location. There is virtually never a reason, beyond laziness or stupidity, to break URLs when you move something. Perhaps my original statement that you quoted should have said "don't break" instead of "don't change," but I think the point was clear from the context.
Here's an example, though obviously this is unlikely to ever disappear:
http://catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
I don't have any problem with that URL at all. I never said URLs shouldn't be descriptive; I said that they shouldn't be so long that they become difficult to use. They shouldn't be so long that you need a URL shortening service like bit.ly to cope with them. What is it that motivates someone to create a URL that is 150 characters long? It's not an effort to make the URL more useful, it's just SEO. See more details here [slashdot.org]