Google Breaking URL Shortener Links
In 2018, we announced the deprecation and transition of Google URL Shortener because of the changes we’ve seen in how people find content on the internet, and the number of new popular URL shortening services that emerged in that time. This meant that we no longer accepted new URLs to shorten but that we would continue serving existing URLs.
Today, the time has come to turn off the serving portion of Google URL Shortener.
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Note that the interstitial page may cause disruptions in the current flow of your goo.gl links. For example, if you are using other 302 redirects, the interstitial page may prevent the redirect flow from completing correctly.
A lot things on the Internet are going to break next fall. I know people like using short URLs for social media, or to hide tracking parameters, but this yet another example of why they are a bad idea.
When Google announced in 2018 that it was shutting down goo.gl, the company encouraged developers to migrate to Firebase Dynamic Links (FDL) — which has also since been deprecated.
How much money could it possible cost to just keep this service running in perpetuity? Tim Berners-Lee wrote his seminal essay, “Cool URIs Don’t Change” back in 1998. It’s bad enough when companies go out of business, taking their web servers down with them. But Google isn’t struggling financially.
Google continues its epic run of reminding people why you should never depend on their services.
Previously:
- Google Podcasts Is Gone
- Twitter Delays URLs for Certain Sites
- This URL Shortener Situation Is Officially Out of Control
- Twitter’s URL Changes
Update (2024-08-08): Nick Heer:
In principle, I support this deprecation because it is confusing and dangerous for Google’s own shortened URLs to have the same domain as ones created by third-party users. But this is a Google-created problem because it designed its URLs poorly. It should have never been possible for anyone else to create links with the same URL shortener used by Google itself. Yet, while it feels appropriate for a Google service to be unreliable over a long term, it also should not be ending access to links which may have been created just about five years ago.
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When Google announced in 2018 that it was shutting down goo.gl, the company encouraged developers to migrate to Firebase Dynamic Links (FDL) — which has also since been deprecated.
Incredible.
Surely the cost of reputation outweighs the cost of running it for another ten years.
To be fair, link shorteners were never a great idea, obfuscating destinations, brittle, certainly not preventing tracking, I presume it was largely driven by Twitter's character limits?
"When Google announced in 2018 that it was shutting down goo.gl, the company encouraged developers to migrate to Firebase Dynamic Links (FDL) — which has also since been deprecated."
Classic Google!
@Nathan_RETRO "obfuscating destinations"
The real way to do it is and has always been http://www.yahoo.com:cool_news_story@goatse.orworse.com/something_tantalizing.html
On the one hand, I’m sympathetic to the challenges of maintaining even part of a deprecated device for X years after the service is shut down. These things have actual costs beyond the cost of running the service; time and code maintenance and keeping abreast of security stuff all has a cost too. And I can imagine that from a 5000-foot view, the amount of activity any of those shortlinks attract is negligible to non-existent.
On the other hand, breaking links on the web sucks. Especially if you’re Google.
When GitHub made a similar decision 2-ish years ago (and our shortener had only worked for GitHub repos, not general URLs), the outcry from academics and others who used the shortener in ways we didn’t expect led us to continuing to serve the redirects (albeit not for stuff that 404ed or was to malicious stuff). I think that was a good compromise and the right decision.
Obviously, our shortener was probably an order of magnitude less in volume than Google’s — but the fact remains that Google has options here that don’t involve continuing to host/maintain a service. We moved ours to some sort of statically hosted thing for the database as opposed to continuing to run the shortlink service and so if Google cared about this, they could do something similar for everything that didn’t 404 or didn’t go to links they’ve identified as malicious. Or even just preserve links that have had more than X clicks in the last 6 years. Lots of options that don’t include just breaking URLs.
I foresaw this many many years ago.
And so never used shortened links for anything, if I could avoid it.
@Leonidas de Jong Right?!!? I can't say I've never used shortened links in my life, but definitely not something I preferred.
@Christina Warren
Yeah, I can see that too, users often adapt tools to needs outside of original scope. Which is actually pretty cool and shows the power of human ingenuity. Not going to hate on that. I'm simply not a fan of link shorteners because they've failed in the past (remember when Libya started filtering content they didn't like on .ly domains, bit.ly was in a world of hurt) or the tools themselves are deprecated. Links are already fragile enough to begin with, I was not a fan of the middle man approach to shorteners causing more possible points of breakage. Thank you for sharing your hands on experience on this topic.
