My thanks to Terence Eden, who recently reposted on Mastodon the fact that Google are shutting down their ‘goo.gl’ URL-shortener in a month’s time.
URL shorteners are those services that take long URLs and turn them into shorter ones by maintaining a database mapping the latter to the former. Tinyurl.com was perhaps the first; bit.ly is another one. They can be handy as a temporary way to send someone a more manageable link, but you shouldn’t rely on them for anything important or long-term.
Even if they don’t come from a company that has Google’s reputation for killing things off, it’s worth remembering that any URL that you don’t control yourself is dependent on at least one other person or organisation. The more proxies and the more third parties invoved in getting to the content, the less likely it is that somebody in the future will be able to use the link successfully.
My blog is over 24 years old now, and it’s a salutory thought that the average lifespan of companies even on the S&P 500 is only about 15 years. Even if a big company doesn’t cancel its shortening service, it may be cancelled itself before too long! I’ve just replaced the two ‘goo.gl’ links in my past posts and, though I’m glad to see that tinyurl.com is still going strong and outliving the S&P average, I’ve replaced most of those too.
However, it’s not always that easy to replace them. As Terence points out, a vast number of academics have been unfortunate or unwise enough to use ‘goo.gl’ links in hundreds of thousand of citations in PDF papers… and they’ll all stop working by the end of August. The one ray of light here is that the ever-wonderful Internet Archive Wayback Machine seems to remember where those links pointed to when it last scanned them. So if you’ve used a goo.gl link anywhere important, you might want to check whether it has been captured.
In general, though, remember that the only URLs you can be confident have a long-term future are the ones you control and preserve yourself!
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