All goo.gl links will be unresponsive after August 25th, 2025.

#killedbygoogle

  • Google’s URL shortening service goo.gl links will stop working on August 25th, 2025, resulting in 404 errors.
  • Starting August 23rd, 2024, goo.gl links will show an interstitial page warning users of the upcoming shutdown.
  • Google initially suggested migrating to Firebase Dynamic Links (FDL), which has also since been deprecated.
  • paraphrandEnglish
    91•4 months ago

    I’m sure many people chose this one over other shortners because they assumed it would outlast the others. 🤦‍♀️

    • @[email protected]English
      47•4 months ago

      So many links are going to go dead because of this. I’m sure plenty of software out there used this to automatically shorten links for posting on social media etc.

  • Prison MikeEnglish
    43•4 months ago

    Good! Sick of link shorteners, 99% of the time I’ve seen them used it’s for tracking and/or disguising the true destination.

    • @[email protected]English
      26•4 months ago

      It was cool back when there were valid reasons for character limitations. But I agree, url obfuscation was often used for less savory reasons.

      • @[email protected]English
        6•4 months ago

        And I’m not sure how shorteners work for Firefox’s tracking removal, but I’m guessing not well.

  • ѕєχυαℓ ρσℓутσρєEnglish
    38•4 months ago

    If they just released the db, I think there are be many who’d be happy to host the service. But knowing Google, they probably won’t do shit.

  • @ReallyActuallyFrankensteinEnglish
    37•4 months ago

    Google shuts down a lot of things, and usually there is nothing to do and parts of the internet break forever. But…I feel like this is one that would be cheap and at least possible to mitigate without Google’s help.

    Crawl for all goo.gl links prior to the 2025 shutdown, cache and enter the link and the redirect link into a database, and create a simple open source in-line replacement extension for browsers that intercepts goo.gl links and replaces them with the real link. These are just URLs, so the database even for hundreds of thousands of entries shouldn’t be huge.

    I mean, I’m not going to do it, but…

    • @[email protected]English
      5•4 months ago

      the database even for hundreds of thousands of entries shouldn’t be huge

      Hundreds of thousands of entries would be negligible (at 1000 bytes average per entry, 500k entries would be half a gigabyte) but the issue is that a full archive would be around 36 billion entries (making that archive around 34 TB, but probably smaller because the average link size is likely much lower than 1000 characters).

  • AutoTL;DRBEnglish
    5•4 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    If you ever used Google’s URL shortening service goo.gl before it was shut down in 2019, be warned — those links will stop working on August 25th, 2025.

    Google announced in a blog post that “the time has come to turn off the serving portion of Google URL Shortener” and that any links in the https://goo.gl/* format will respond with a 404 error next year.

    Ahead of the shutdown, goo.gl links will start showing an interstitial page on August 23rd, 2024, notifying users that “this link will no longer work in the near future.” This message will initially appear for a “percentage of existing links,’’ which will increase as the deadline draws closer.

    Google is encouraging developers to update impacted links as soon as possible, however, as this interstitial page may cause disruptions to link redirections.

    When Google announced in 2018 that it was shutting down goo.gl, the company encouraged developers to migrate to Firebase Dynamic Links (FDL) — which has also since been deprecated.

    The original article contains 165 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 0%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • @[email protected]English
    5•4 months ago

    Wait, people outside Google were allowed to use it? Huh, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that in the wild.