Google URL Shortener Links Will Stop Working Next Month (googleblog.com) 36
New submitter davecotter writes: So Google's staring at its old goo.gl links and thinking, "Why is this perfectly functioning service still even a thing?" After many businesses and users adopted it like it was the second coming of the way-too-long hyperlink, Google's now decided to yank the plug. Starting August 23, 2024, you'll get a flashy "don't say we didn't warn you" pop-up, and by August 25, 2025, goo.gl links (unless made by Google itself) will vanish into the 404 abyss.
Translation: Thanks for trusting us -- now pack up and find a new shortener.
Translation: Thanks for trusting us -- now pack up and find a new shortener.
Oh no! (Score:5, Funny)
How am I going to rickroll people now?
Re: (Score:2)
So it's not like YouTube's URLs aren't obtuse enough already?
Re: (Score:2)
So it's not like YouTube's URLs aren't obtuse enough already?
In all fairness, if you’ve not memorized the RickRoll Youtube URL by the time you left DEFCON 30, you’re asking for it. Even the kids abusing this found far more issues in Realityland.
https://www.infosecurity-magaz... [infosecuri...gazine.com]
Gotta love how they remastered RickRoll in 4K..as if pranksters needed the upgrade.
Re: (Score:2)
It actually sounds like the school responded in a good way to that! They may have realized it could just as easily have been porn...
Or ransomware (Score:2)
It could have also been a million dollar ransomware attack.
Re: (Score:2)
You do it the proper way and invite Rick to your Foo Fighters concert. https://youtu.be/IdkCEioCp24?s... [youtu.be]
Re: (Score:2)
How am I going to rickroll people now?
QR codes
Thanks for the free service. (Score:1, Insightful)
Since you offered a free service for a while, I now feel entitled to it.
You must work for me for free forever, Google.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It is the way they cancelled it (Score:5, Insightful)
People can and should judge service providers on how they handle end-of-life situations like these. Google is just doing yet another Google in ensuring their baby is killed instead of reborn.
Re:It is the way they cancelled it (Score:4, Insightful)
Google announced the phasing out of this service 7 years ago. I'd say we have had plenty of time to make adjustments.
I am NO fan of Google. I don't like their infamy over freezing email accounts and locking people out of their lives, with notoriously bad customer support. It's one reason I don't rely on their services.
But at the same time, the attitude of entitlement in the summary was a bit on the disgusting side. However big Google may be, it is still a profitable business, not a charity, and so it has no obligation to provide us with free services.
Re: It is the way they cancelled it (Score:2)
The obfuscation was a feature. Not a strong degree of security but not nothing. Dumping the database of urls would be insane and invite all kinds of scrutiny and abuse.
Re:Thanks for the free service. (Score:4, Insightful)
Since you offered a free service for a while, I now feel entitled to it. You must work for me for free forever, Google.
That is exactly right. Its essentially a bait and switch. You offer a free service to prevent anyone from creating one and charging for it. Then, once you have killed any competition, you eliminate the free service. This is destroying the internet as anything other than a collection of services controlled by monopolies. It should be illegal. If you decide to abandon a free service, you have to allow anyone else who is willing to continue offering it. You don't own it because the users were as much a part of its creation as you were.
Link shorteners are a horrible idea, security-wise (Score:4, Interesting)
This is one Google service I'm happy to see go away.
Re:[PUBLIC] Link shorteners are a horrible idea (Score:3)
They're great if they're curated and controlled like what Microsoft does with its "AKA" service. I know of a few organizations that run OSS shorteners like URLS for managed short URLs to what would otherwise be horrendous symbol salads to type into an address bar.
Re: (Score:2)
While I'm all for blocking new use (something they did a long time ago), I am not happy to see anything further the link-rot disease on the internet.
Yay, not a great many things will be broken and 404ed. You should not be celebrating this.
Re: (Score:1)
The service was useful for me even without any need of sharing links.
Before Strava and other similar services, I would map routes on Google maps and then paste the shortened URL into a spreadsheet with a text that describe the route. I think I did that because Magellan stopped supporting uploading data from my HRM.
Anyway, I started to manually replace the shortened links in my spreadsheet that last time this story hit Slashdot, but became bored. If there were a tool to replace them, that would be great!
Re: (Score:2)
Anyway, I started to manually replace the shortened links in my spreadsheet that last time this story hit Slashdot, but became bored. If there were a tool to replace them, that would be great!
I'd think, using something like curl or wget, it'd be straightforward to write a script for this.
In other words, less chances of being duped. (Score:4)
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, the fact Google themselves used it for official stuff while allowing every phisher use it to make URLs that looked exactly the same was a huge security issue.
1) not news, 2) better way to shut things down (Score:3, Interesting)
1) This isn't news. The "recent" announcement was posted a year ago. No new links have been added since 2018.
2) A better transition would be to make the forwarding non-automatic for a period of time. Keeping a non-auto-forwarding, read-only (no new entries) link-forwarding service in place for a long time shouldn't be a burden for a company like Google.
As a courtesy, it would be nice to include an explaination/warning that the "short link" was set up in or before 2018 and that the destination link may or may not be what it was back then.
Re: (Score:2)
They did.
The question is, why they can't publish the database in a searchable form for the event that someone encounters a link they still need to resolve.
Re: (Score:2)
It shouldn't be shutdown at all. This is going to be one of the single biggest contributions to link-rot that the internet has ever seen. As if the internet wasn't broken enough. I'm all for blocking new users, but seriously this will break a great many things.
Starting August 23, 2024? (Score:2)
Starting August 23, 2024?
What gives? Do we need a time machine now?
Re: (Score:3)
Starting August 23, 2024?
What gives? Do we need a time machine now?
Yes, but you can't use Google's. They retroactively shut it down in 2078.
TinyURL (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
They're gonna need a bigger graveyard (Score:1)
ABout time. (Score:2)
These were only every primarily used to push malware.
Do TinyURL and it's cohorts next.
Anyone remotely surprised was not paying attention (Score:2)
One More for the List:
https://killedbygoogle.com/ [killedbygoogle.com]
Anyone building or planning anything intended to last more than a month while being based on or dependent on Google products or services has no place in any industry.
Re: (Score:1)
I had mine tuned perfectly at the time. I tried the alternatives when it was shutdown but none were equal to me. I lost interest and moved on without it.
its a different time now, not sure if I would go back if it was available.
Man, Fuck Google! (Score:2)
They burned me back with the Reader cancellation. Aint never trusting them again.
Fucking Microsoft. Oh, wait. I meant Google. (Score:2)
But, what's the difference? Neither one listens to their userbase and both happily fuck-over users.
We need a graphical replacement OS for windows so we can dump Microsoft. No, linux isn't it.
Google can suck shit. I'm long done with them.
It's just part of the Google pattern (Score:2)
Google has announced the final shutdown of goo.gl links, effective August 25, 2025. After that date, any lingering goo.gl URLs that haven’t been re-routed will return a 404. This time it’s not a surprise—they stopped issuing new links in 2018, and the latest blog post from the Firebase team claims that 99% of the remaining links saw no activity in the last month. From an operational standpoint, the rationale is hard to argue with. Old redirect infrastructure costs money, invites abuse (ri