Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

goo.gl/0R8XX6 is now 404 on the live web.  It's been nearly two months since Google stopped redirecting some of its goo.gl short URLs  (August 25, 2025). In previous posts, I looked at how many of these goo.gl URLs that Wayback Machine had archived ( at least 1.3M at the time ), and estimated 4,000 goo.gl short links used in scholarly publications would be lost .  In early September, I verified that Google had indeed implemented this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea. It's now mid-October, and I'm just now getting a chance to write up this behavior. While the redirections are missing from the live web,  many (most? all?)  have been archived , and it also turns out they leave a live web tombstone.  First, let's look at the live web goo.gl URLs. The ones that were not lucky enough to receive traffic in "late 2024" no longer return a sunset message, and now return a garden variety HTTP 404 (image above, HTTP response below):  % curl -Is https:/...

  In the summer of 2025, I was selected for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) , a program that introduces new contributors to open source software development. I had the opportunity to contribute to the Internet Archive , an organization I have long admired for its efforts to preserve digital knowledge for all. Numerous open source organizations annually participate in the program as mentoring organizations ( 2025 mentoring organizations ), and that includes the Internet Archive . As a GSoC contributor, I was mentored by Dr. Sawood Alam , Research Lead of the Wayback Machine and WS-DL alum. Over the coding period, our project focused on detecting social media content in TV news, specifically through logo and screenshot detection. My work as a contributor is documented in my previous blog post , while this post highlights the GSoC program and my experience in it. Becoming a GSoC contributor Becoming a GSoC contributor is open to any beginners in open source (student or non-student) wh...

11 of the 26 goo.gl URLs for data sets surveyed in Yin & Berger (2017) In a previous post, I estimated that when Google turns off its goo.gl URL shortening service , at least 1.3M goo.gl URLs are already saved by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.  Thanks to the efforts of Archive Team and others, that number will surely grow in the coming weeks before the shutdown.  And Google has already announced plans to keep the links that have recently been used . But all of this begs the question: "who cares about all those old goo.gl links anyway?"  In this post, I examine a single technical paper from 2017 that has 26 goo.gl URLs, one (1/26) of which is scheduled to be deprecated in two weeks.  Assuming this loss rate (1/26) holds for all the goo.gl URLs indexed in Google Scholar, then at least 4,000 goo.gl URLs from the scholarly record will be lost .  In our discussions for the Tech Friend article, Shira Ovide shared with me " When to use what data set fo...