Google's goo․gl links will stop working in August 2025
Submitted 9 months ago by corbin@infosec.pub to technology@beehaw.org
https://9to5google.com/2024/07/18/googl-links/
Comments
thingsiplay@beehaw.org 9 months ago
Adanisi@lemmy.zip 9 months ago
Another one for the graveyard!
corbin@infosec.pub 9 months ago
That’s a whole lot of link rot about to happen.
anarchrist@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
The Jedis are going to feel this one
henfredemars@infosec.pub 9 months ago
Don’t build your life around Google services.
Beaver@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
Switch to Proton, Linux, Librewolf, Matrix, Gimp and Libreoffice.
c0smokram3r@midwest.social 9 months ago
I’ve been v curious abt matrix but it’s taken me years to get everyone I care abt on signal 😅
smeg@feddit.uk 9 months ago
Don’t rely on any company keeping a service running unless you’ve got a contract with them
Penguincoder@beehaw.org 9 months ago
GoogLOL
thingsiplay@beehaw.org 9 months ago
Googlel
Used instead of lol; when you’re too dank for lol
Moonrise2473@feddit.it 9 months ago
How much money they can save for this?
Probably with the saved money can’t even pay one single day of salary for the CEO
jarfil@beehaw.org 9 months ago
URL shorteners in general, or just Google?
wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/URLTeam
Goo.gl has a namespace for 10 billion entries, it used to keep tracking for each link, with a user interface.
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?
jonne@infosec.pub 9 months ago
Probably like $50/month in cloud resources if you turned off all the extra stuff and only did redirects and kept it around in read only mode. You’d need to do some dev work up front and price that in as well, obviously.
halm@leminal.space 9 months ago
Oh, the CEO’s pay is secure from day one of the fiscal year. They’re trying to pay the cleaning staff with this.
metaStatic@kbin.earth 9 months ago
What cleaning staff? Cleaning is just another part of your job now, this is purely for the shareholders.
radivojevic@discuss.online 9 months ago
Why anyone uses a single Google product, I’ll never know.
SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org 9 months ago
Disclaimer: I don’t use any googlee 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 little 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.
DJDarren@thelemmy.club 9 months ago
We use Google Forms and Sheets at work, precisely because easy for a bunch of us to access, and our boss is tight as fuck, so it being free is a massive draw.
I keep looking to other ways to perform the few functions we use, but ultimately I lack the knowledge and resources to roll my own.
Gork@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Does Google no longer want to pay for the Greenland .gl TLD?
cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 months ago
what were they used for? internal redirects like t.co? or something for customers? genuine question
jarfil@beehaw.org 9 months ago
Anyone could generate them, for free, and they came with analytics on the side. Google also generated them for sharing content from their services.
tal@lemmy.today 9 months ago
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).
mp3@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
Looks like I’ll finally have to replace that link in my resume after all.
It was useful to know when a copy of my printed resume was accessed online through the link I added on the footer.
Midnitte@beehaw.org 9 months ago
OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
The dumbest part is like, why? How much work is it really to keep goo.gl links around?
lmao
jarfil@beehaw.org 9 months ago
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 sever 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.
Kissaki@beehaw.org 9 months ago
They could drop all the tracking though and only serve the public redirects. A much simpler product that would retain web links.
Penguincoder@beehaw.org 9 months ago
Good analysis, I agree and understand.
jonne@infosec.pub 9 months ago
Yeah, shouldn’t be too hard to at least keep the existing links working in a read only state.