https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Goo.gl

https://tracker.archiveteam.org/goo-gl/ (1.66B work items remaining as of this comment)

How to run an ArchiveTeam warrior: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior

(edit: i see jaydenmilne commented about this further down thread, mea culpa)

IMO it's less Google's fault and more a crappy tech education problem.

It wasn't a good idea to use shortened links in a citation in the first place, and somebody should have explained that to the authors. They didn't publish a book or write an academic paper in a vacuum - somebody around them should have known better and said something.

And really it's not much different than anything else online - it can disappear on a whim. How many of those shortened links even go to valid pages any more?

And no company is going to maintain a "free" service forever. It's easy to say, "It's only ...", but you're not the one doing the work or paying for it.

Jm2c, but if your resource is a link to an online resource that's borderline already (at any point the content can be changed or disappear).

Even worse if your resource is a shortened link by some other service, you've just added yet another layer of unreliable indirection.

For people wanting to include URL references in things like books, what’s the right approach to take today?

I’m genuinely asking. It seems like its hard to trust that any service will remaining running for decades

The act of vandalism occurs when someone creates a shortened URL, not when they stop working.

The vandalism was relying on Google.

When they began offering this, their rep for ending services was already so bad I refused to consider goo.gl. Amazing for how many years now they have introduced then ended services with large user bases. Gmail being in "beta" for five years was, weirdly, to me, a sign they might stick with it.

In the first segment of the very first episode of the Abstractions podcast, we talked about Google killing its goo.gl URL obfuscation service and why it is such a craven abdication of responsibility. Have a listen, if you’re curious:

Overcast link to relevant chapter: https://overcast.fm/+BOOFexNLJ8/02:33

Original episode link: https://shows.arrowloop.com/@abstractions/episodes/001-the-r...

I have always struggled with this. If I buy a book I don’t want an online/URL reference in it. Put the book/author/isbn/page etc. Or refer to the magazine/newspaper/journal/issue/page/author/etc.

> And for what? The cost of keeping a few TB online and a little bit of CPU power?

For the immeasurable benefits of educating the public.

Can't someone just go through programmatically right now and build a list of all these links and where they point to? And then put up a list somewhere that everyone can go look up if they need to?

Truly, the most Googly of sunsets.

While an interesting attempt at an impact statement, 90% of the results on the first two pages for me are not references to goo.gl shorteners, but are instead OCR errors or just gibberish. One of the papers is from 1981.

> An absolute act of cultural vandalism.

It makes me mad also, but something we have to learn the hard way is that nothing in this world is permanent. Never, ever depend on any technology to persist. Not even URLs to original hosts should be required. Inline everything.

The cost of dealing and supporting an old codebase instead of burning it all and releasing a written-from-scratch replacement next year

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> The right question is "how much total value do all of the links provide", not "what percent are used".

Yes, but it doesn't bring in the sweet promotion home, unfortunately. Ironically, if 99% of them doesn't see any traffic, you can scale back the infra, run it in 2 VMs, and make sure a single person can keep it up as a side quest, just for fun (but, of course, pay them for their work).

This beancounting really makes me sad.

Indeed. I've probably looked at less than 1% of my family photos this month but I still want to keep them.

I bet 99% of URLs that exist on the public web had no activity last month. Might as well delete the entire WWW because it's obviously worthless.

Don't be confused! That's not how they made the decision; it's how they're selling it.

> "more than 99% of them had no activity in the last month"

Better to have a short URL and not need it, than need a short URL and not have it IMO.

From Google's perspective, the question is "How many ads are we selling on these links" and if it's near zero, that's the value to them.

What fraction of indexed Google sites, Youtube videos, or Google Photos were retrieved in the last month? Think of the cost savings!

I don’t think they’re actually that dumb. I think the dirty secret behind “data driven decision making” is managers don’t want data to tell them what to do, they want “data” to make even the idea of disagreeing with them look objectively wrong and stupid.

"Data-driven decision making"

Google killing their domains service was the last straw for me. I started moving all of my stuff off of Google since then.

> Remember this next time you are thinking of depending upon a Google service.

Next time? I guess there’s a wave of new people that haven’t learned that that lesson yet.

Looks like they have saved 8000+ volumes of data to the Internet Archive so far [0]. The project page for this effort is here [1].

0: https://archive.org/details/archiveteam_googl

1: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Goo.gl

Docker container FTW. Thanks for the heads-up - this is a project I will happily throw a Hetzner server at.

Thanks for sharing this. I've often felt that the ease by which we can erase digital content makes our time period susceptible to a digital dark ages to archaeologists studying history a few thousand years from now.

Us preserving digital archives is a good step. I guess making hard copies would be the next step.

After a while I started to get "Google asks for a login" errors. Should I just keep going? There's no indication on what I should do on the ArchiveTeam wiki

Just started, super easy to set up

This actually makes the most logical sense to me, thank you for the idea. I don't agree with the way they're doing it of course but this probably is risk mitigation for them.

It will include many URLs that are semi-private, like Google Docs that are shared via link.

I'd rather see it as a searchable database, which I would think is super cheap and no maintenance for Google, and avoids these privacy issues. You can input a known goo.gl and get it's real URL, but can't just list everything out.

Are they all public? Where can I see them?

People still trust Google?

To some extent, it's cases like this which show the real fragility of everything existing as a unified whole in google3.

While clearly maintenance and ownership is still a major problem, one could easily imagine deploying something similar — especially read-only — using GCP's Cloud Run and BigTable products could be less work to maintain, as you're not chasing anywhere near such a moving target.

Many good points, but if you don't mind me asking: if you were at Google, would you be willing to be the lead of that archive team, knowing that you'll be stuck at this position for the next 10 years, with the possibility of your team being downsized/eliminated when the wind blows slightly in the other direction?

There’s two things that are real torture to google dev teams: 1) Being told a product is completed and needs no new features or changes 2) Being made to work on legacy code

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https://killedbygoogle.com/

I have been using a shortening service with my own domain name - it's really handy, and I figure that if they go down I could always manually configure my own DNS or spin up some self-hosted solution.

That needs a chart.

It'd probably cost a couple tens of dollars, and Google is simply too poor to afford that these days. They've spent all their money on AI and have nothing left

it's not the cost of hosting/sharing it. It's the cost employing people to maintain this alongside other google products.

So, at minimum, assuming there are 2 people maintaining this at google that probably means it would cost them $250k/yr in just payroll to keep this going. That's probably a very low ball estimate on the people involved but it still shows how expensive theses old products can be.

That’s a good thing from my perspective. I wish they’d crush YouTube next. That’s the only Google IP I haven’t been able to avoid.

They weren't customers since they didn't buy anything, and yes, as sweet as "free" is, it is the fault of users to expect free to last forever

For one, not enough people seem to be aware of it. They don't seem to have given that announcement the importance and effort it deserved. Secondly, I can't say that they have a good migration plan when shutting down their services. People scrambling like this to backup the data is rather common these days. And finally, this isn't a service that can be so easily replaced. Even if people knew that it was going away, there would be short-links that they don't remember, but are important nevertheless. Somebody gave an example above - citations in research papers. There isn't much thought given to the consequences when decisions like this are taken.

Granted that it was a free service and Google is under no obligation to keep it going. But if they were going to be so casual about it, they shouldn't have offered it in the first place. Or perhaps, people should take that lesson instead and spare themselves the pain.

I just went through the old thread and it's comments. It appears google didn't specifically state they were going to end the service. They hinted that links would continue working, but new ones would not be able to be created. It was left a bit open-ended, and that likely made people think the links would work indefinitely.

This seems to be echoed by the archiveteam scrambling to get this archived. I figure they would have backed these up years ago if it was more well known.

From the 2018 announcement:

> URL Shortener has been a great tool that we’re proud to have built. As we look towards the future, we’re excited about the possibilities of Firebase Dynamic Links

Perhaps relatedly, Google is shutting down Firebase Dynamic Links too, in about a month (2025-08-25).