#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.
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 replacement 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…
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).
Interesting - how do we know it’s 36 billion entries? I just estimated that it hadn’t been used that much based on almost never seeing anyone actually use it…
I don’t know for sure, but that’s the scale I would expect (billions) and the number came from https://www.seroundtable.com/google-goo-gl-urls-to-404-37758.html