The announced death of the short links service is part of a context of large upheavals for the web as we know it.
A new Google service will join the already overcrowded cemetery of products disconnected by its designer. As of August 25, no shortened link thanks to the “GOO.GL” service will be accessible. Without withdrawal solution, millions of links will be sent.
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A little surprising announcement
We won’t give up the surprise. Google had already drawn the rebuilding of its linking shortcutor last summer. Besides, it was impossible to create new links since service since 2019! The next step is only evident. Of which Act: Google announces the deletion of all the links created by its service on August 25.
After this date, all these links will automatically return to a page 404, the service no longer allowing the URL to be deciphered and returned to the corresponding web address. But the impact of the closure of goo.gl. On her blog last summer, the American firm already estimated that 99 % of the links shortened by him were no longer active at all. Digital pollution, in a way.
The fact remains that, for the 1 % of still active links, there are only a few weeks left to replace the links that must be with an alternative solution. There are many competing services to create short links. The best known is bit.ly, but you can also cite Kutt or short.io.
Why use short links?
GOO.GL’s main advantage in front of its direct competitors is its instantaneity and free access. Indeed, many third -party services strongly limit the ability to create short links. By paying, however, we access the possibility of personalizing them, in particular by using its domain name for more clarity. For example, a short link to the article you are reading could be “https: //fnac.lec/google-liens-courts”, which is much more digestible and readable than the current “https://leclaireur.fnac.com/article/613147-google-pourquoi-le-raccourcier-de-liens-go-gl-gl-bl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-gl-
But you may have to see in the disappearance of GOO.GL the end of an era. We have documented it a lot in recent months on The scout : The web as we know it is disappearing and the interface will undoubtedly give way to artificial intelligence chatbots capable of navigating the internet for us. In this context, the link, whether short or not, no longer matters.
The shortened links services also reached their peak in popularity in the Mitan of the 2010s, while Twitter limited posts to 140 characters. A bullshit of the internet before, therefore.
