Google said that they have plans to “retire” (but I’m going to say “take down” because I’m pissed) its link shortener, that millions of news sites, blogs, social media users, and hundreds more have used, goo.gl.
The link shortener that Google has supported and used for years, just to save money?
Google says that people aren’t using link shorteners anymore, which is true; most people don’t, but millions of people like me make a bit.ly link every once in a while. I use Buffer’s buff.ly all the time. But taking down this link shortener will “destroy” millions of websites that still use goo.gl.
“…we redirected URLs that showed no activity in late 2024 to a message specifying that the link would be deactivated in August, and these are the only links targeted to be deactivated…”
https://goo.gl/Pp01oy on Safari on MacOS
Now only “some” links will stop working but some websites like this research paper the Washington Post found has over 30 goo.gl links in it, but in the near feature the links may not work, and because this is a research paper these links are critical.
image from Ecosia search
Why we all loved link shorteners
In the 2000s link shorteners like bit.ly, shorter.at and tinyurl.com were extremely helpful for turning long urls like
In to a shorter link such as
Even to this day I still use link shorteners all the time, in fact MBD is working on making our own!
