Just when I thought the URL shortener fad was on the way out...

But Google knows the contents of each page, though.

If they were going to be awesome about it, they know what the page says, so they can just store an MD5 hash of it, and find what the new URL is, if it's still live, or serve a cached version if they can't find it.

That'd be pretty nifty.

They modestly omitted mentioning another point in favour of goo.gl:

* Chances are, we're not going to go out of business and break your shortened links any time soon.

* Chances are, we will log all the links you click and associate them to your account even though you don't want us to do it.

Do you have any reason to believe that Google does this, despite Google publicly stating that they do not? I really doubt Google would stake the entire reputation of an already extraordinarily profitable company for the sake of the stupidest conspiracy ever.

I mean just think about it... How valuable is goo.gl to Google really? It will probably be used by a tiny fraction of users and at best would give Google a tiny bit of extra data on you. Absolutely nothing, compared to Google Analytics or most of the other Google products.

Now how much would it cost to run an air tight conspiracy and block all whistle blowers in a large corporation like Google? Note, even one verifiable leak would create a gigantic shit storm, probably knocking billions off of Google's market cap, not including lawsuits and fines.

I think I'm going to side with occam's razor on this one and say it's probably safe to use goo.gl.

How is that different than any other link shortener? This reflexive Google hate is getting ridiculous.

The other link shorteners don't have access to your email, to your search history, to your phone, to the places you look up on the internet, etc...

Are you under the impression that people who use Google services does not realize that their activity is logged? Do you think this is some sinister uber world domination plan by Google you just suddenly discovered?

We know that we are constantly logged and we still use Google. Not because we are forced to use Google or that there are no good alternative to their services. We use it because we want to use it and because they are, in most cases, genuinely superior services.

Don't assume people who use everything that comes out of Google are stupid and ignorant. I actually want Google to log all my activity so that I can have a more connected experience with all the Google services I use. Thats the whole idea, its not a sinister plan.

I think you need to stop using google if you find this to be a problem.

It sounds like you are accusing Google of violating its privacy policy. Do you have any evidence that this is the case, or is it just speculation?

I can't find anything in Google's privacy policy that prevents them from using any information they have within Google. In fact, they specifically say personal information may be used for the purposes of:

- Providing our services, including the display of customized content and advertising;

- Auditing, research and analysis in order to maintain, protect and improve our services;

- Ensuring the technical functioning of our network;

- Protecting the rights or property of Google or our users; and

- Developing new services.

The information they may use in such ways includes "server logs [which] may include information such as your web request, Internet Protocol address, browser type, browser language, the date and time of your request and one or more cookies that may uniquely identify your browser."

Personally I like that. The more google records for me, the closer to a true lifestream we get. Saves me some work.

Is it possible to use this with Chrome? I haven't seen a way yet. It seems kind of silly to leave out support for their own browser. Google toolbar requires IE or Firefox.

I think the real money is going to be in creating a physical URL shortening device. An appliance that sit on your network and rewrites every URL using a GUID.

I think this is a good play for Google. I'm sick of URL shortening services, but if they are here to stay they might as well be backed by a company that will be around. This is also going to be very useful for them to trend real time sharing.

When this becomes general-use, Analytics integration will be a no-brainer, and awe.sm will not be happy.

I never noticed a speed issue with TinyURL, so their third point is pretty silly to me. Also, add a 4th point, "Self-Serving: if the target page has moved, we get a chance to serve you a redirect with our ads on it".

How are they going to do that? They tell your browser to 301 to the target URL - the browser is what notices the target URL is a 404, not Google, so Google would have no way to know whether or not the target is gone. The target URLs could be private (only accessible to specific ips). Even if google crawled the page, they would have no way of knowing if your browser could reach it.

They wouldn't have any way to know for certain if you could get to it, but they would be able to tell for certain if you couldn't get to it, because they can't get to it from anywhere on their worldwide network. Something is better than nothing.

The point, I think, is that you could still use the shortener to link to an intranet or similar site that is not available to the public web.

Google is really hitting the lows these days.

They overhyped wave and when they launched it nobody knew how to use it for anything besides trolling, then Google trolled us and said that Chrome OS would only "support" SSD because seemingly there is nothing special about it except being overly crippled, but they want to make it look like it boots fast.

And now this, Google are jumping on the utterly useless URL shortening fad. Google is losing it.