Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

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...

The interstitial page for https://goo.gl/12XGLG , telling the user that Google will soon abandon this shortened URL.   Last year, Google announced it intended to deprecate its URL shortener , goo.gl , and just last week they released the final shut down date of August 25 . I was quoted in Tech Friend , a Washington Post newsletter by Shira Ovide , joking that the move "would save Google dozens of dollars."  Then last Friday, Google announced a slight update , and that links that have had some activity in "late 2024" would continue to redirect. To be sure, the shut down isn't about saving money, or at least not about the direct cost of maintaining the service. goo.gl stopped accepting new shortening requests in 2019, but continued to redirect existing shortened URLs, and maintaining the server with a static mapping of shortened URLs to their full URLs has a negligible hardware cost. The real reason is likely that nobody within Google wants to be responsible for ...