[HN Gopher] Enlisting in the Fight Against Link Rot
___________________________________________________________________
Enlisting in the Fight Against Link Rot
Author : jszymborski
Score : 156 points
Date : 2025-08-12 14:52 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jszym.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (jszym.com)
| mcherm wrote:
| This is ridiculous.
|
| Google is not some opaque corporate entity (I mean, yes it IS,
| but...), it is made up of individuals, many of whom read this
| site.
|
| Google should offer to send (the public content from) their DB
| directly to The Internet Archive. It results in LESS overhead for
| Google than this attempt to scrape it, and results in better
| information.
| ndr wrote:
| They could offer the domain too to be honest.
| eamag wrote:
| The domain is still used in google maps "share" links, for
| example
|
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/<id>
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| subdomain delegation isn't too hard to manage :)
| procaryote wrote:
| security issue
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| sure, everything's a security issue when you don't pay
| attention to it :)
| cxr wrote:
| maps.app.goo.gl and maps.google.com are exactly the same
| number of characters.
|
| Those links smack of the same mindset behind "Refactor to
| rewrite procedure A in terms of procedure B. 7 lines
| deleted; 17 lines added."
| mcherm wrote:
| They certainly could, but all I'm asking for here are things
| that SAVE money for Google. (They don't have to pay to
| support the scraping.)
| jmyeet wrote:
| This is unbelievable. We're all used to Google abandonware by now
| but the resources required for storage of shortened URLs and any
| dev maintenance must be so miniscule to be a rounding error to a
| rounding error on any budget anywhere in the company.
|
| What can possibly be the motivation for this? I see no rationale
| for it in the linked post.
|
| Google already has severe trust issues with anything they launch.
| They hurt themselves because people expect whatever is being
| launched to be abandoned so why invest in it? Reputation matters.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| If I remember correctly, one of the purposes for goo.gl was for
| Google to get metrics on how such direct-links spread "out of
| band" and how often they were opened (as they would direct
| people to pages without Google acting as intermediary).
|
| I guess Chrome metrics and URL-suffixes now answer this better
| (and so they probably failed to justify the internal budget to
| keep it)...
| nvch wrote:
| Maybe it's for the better. They are very clear and consecutive
| in their intentions, leaving no room for doubt.
| tracker1 wrote:
| They simply don't care about anything that isn't making
| Billions a year. Domains was profitable and IMO one of the best
| domain experiences online and they still sold it off.
|
| Google could easily afford to keep existing short links working
| indefinitely and simply not allow new entries... it's a simple
| KV lookup and redirect. Even with billions of links, hardly any
| overhead.
| pimlottc wrote:
| This is a great summary + call to action. The ArchiveTeamWarrior
| tool from the Internet Archive is a pretty sweet piece of kit, it
| is fun and satisfying to watch it crunch away at URLs!
| olejorgenb wrote:
| Very easy to set up as well - at least provided you already
| have a VM manager set up
| encom wrote:
| Isn't there just some simple Python script buried below piles
| of vm/docker nonsense I can run?
| JaggedJax wrote:
| To be fair, it's about 3 very easy steps.
| pimlottc wrote:
| There are a couple options for other containers (Podman,
| Orbstack) on their wiki [0]. But you're free to dig into
| the Dockerfile [1] if you really want to try to figure out
| how to run it directly.
|
| 0: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warri
| or#A...
|
| 1: https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/warrior-
| dockerfile/blob/maste...
| perdomon wrote:
| are there any similar tools/projects where I can use my
| computing power for good?
| nfriedly wrote:
| I run a tor obfs4 bridge along side the archiveteam warrior:
| https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/bridge/
| progbits wrote:
| Nice to see it speeding up.
|
| Two weeks ago [1] they were doing 37k a minute with ETA just
| barely before end of the month. Now it's ~55k a minute, and ETA
| of just 5 more days.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44688478
| hollowonepl wrote:
| Well, to answer the post title question directly: far away from
| google services for years. It was obvious to me 10+ years ago
| that they only sustainable business products for them is search,
| yt, and marketing tracking/performance tools. Nothing else is
| stable, nor secured and there were examples of it before that
| shortener existed. G+ exposed how vulnerable google is regarding
| addon services and now they can't even keep up with the archives
| (usenet). URL Shortener... please, that by definition looks like
| vaporware regardless of the vendor, anyway.
| taftster wrote:
| I don't know that URL shorteners are/were vaporware, per se.
| They delivered what they promised. They just didn't have any
| business model behind it that could keep it sustained. It was
| the classic, "we have built up traffic, now let's figure out
| how to monetize" model.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Considering a URL shortener is basically a KV data store, why?
| It's an insanely low amount of code to maintain a URL shortener.
| morkalork wrote:
| I remember there was a blog by someone who implemented their
| own url-shortener and it turned into a huge amount of work
| fighting spam, scams and malicious actors abusing the system to
| the point of their domain was being threatened with
| blacklisting. But then again, if anyone has the transferable
| skills to handle that, it would be google since they're already
| battling the same bad people on all their other services.
| kentonv wrote:
| But those problems all went away six years ago when Google
| stopped accepting new links.
| Maxion wrote:
| URLs rot, domains expire. So I don't think the problem went
| away completely.
| jsploit wrote:
| It's still being abused by people registering expired
| domains.
| morkalork wrote:
| Exactly, there is no guarantee that what a shortened url
| pointed to 10 years ago is the same as today, or even the
| same owner or administrator.
| kentonv wrote:
| OK but the same vulnerability exists if short URLs
| weren't used -- in that case the link source would link
| directly to the now-hijacked domain. So why does Google
| have to care about this?
|
| Is it because they're worried that the domain name goo.gl
| in the link implies a Google endorsement? Seems like they
| should have thought of that before launching the service
| in the first place?
|
| Still, the frequency of actual abuse must be low and
| going down over time (due to the data set being read-only
| since 2019 and actual traffic to these links surely
| decreasing as time goes on)...
| pimlottc wrote:
| Because maintaining it will not get anyone a promotion
| kentonv wrote:
| Yes, particularly when considering they stopped accepting new
| links six years ago. It's a read-only data set and the total
| storage backing it is probably trivial by Google standards.
|
| But they actually backtracked and said they'll keep the
| "active" links working.
|
| Why even spend the effort to remove the "inactive" links? They
| must feel they represent some sort of liability?
|
| Or would it have been too embarrassing to just cancel the whole
| turn-down plan?
| olejorgenb wrote:
| I'm not sure if this is the definition of "active" the have
| used, but:
|
| <quote> Over time, these existing URLs saw less and less
| traffic as the years went on - in fact more than 99% of them
| had no activity in the last month.</quote>
|
| I'm sure it's correct that the wast majority of links would
| never be used again, but to gauge which links this is I'd say
| you should measure at LEAST a year.
| rsync wrote:
| I run a public URL shorter and you are correct:
|
| it is relatively simple and inexpensive to operate and there is
| no reason it can't continue operating into the indefinite
| future.
|
| I disagree with the op on one major point... They suggest that
| the proper way for a service like this to operate is with a
| public database of links...
|
| However, when I think of all of the different ways, one might
| use a shorter, it seems obvious that many links would
| necessarily be sensitive and/or private.
|
| Therefore, I consider myself to have a dual mandate: privacy of
| the links created, and a duty, that I have assumed, of running
| the service for decades.
| jszymborski wrote:
| I think that's fair. 301works.org[0], for example, requires
| its members to upload their DB to Internet Archive, but IA
| keeps it private. They then ask for the technical control of
| the domain to be transferred 301works.org in the event of the
| site's closure so they can continue serving the traffic.
|
| I do think that, however, that a service can keep their DB
| public _iff_ users know that's the case before creating
| links. Often times, folks are just shortening public links,
| but it is true that people sometimes share "private" links
| (e.g., Google Doc private links, etc...) which shouldn't be
| enumerated.
|
| [0] https://archive.org/details/301works-faq
| procaryote wrote:
| Running any public facing service as a company with a brand and
| security policies is a non-zero amount of work
|
| Also, don't use link shorteners... and don't build link
| shorteners as it just enables people to use them.
| karel-3d wrote:
| It's not technically but abuse is a problem with any user-
| submitted data and always will be
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Sure, but as others have noted, they dont accept new links
| since... 6 years ago. So in the grand scheme of things...
| It's really pointless, and breaks obscure portions of the web
| where these links might still be.
| brokensegue wrote:
| people definitely should donate resources to archive team but as
| someone who has been participating in this project it's my
| understanding that all of the URLs at risk have already been
| backed up
| rickdeckard wrote:
| I wonder if anyone at Google considered just contributing the DB
| and the domain to the Internet Archive.
|
| After stripping any past statistical data from each entry, it
| shouldn't be that much of data per URL...
| sneak wrote:
| URL targets are secrets as they are expected to be non-public.
|
| It would be a serious breach of trust for them to publish the
| database. It likely includes links to non-public YT video URLs,
| for example.
| skwirl wrote:
| The database is being reverse engineered and published
| anyways, as per the article.
| Aurornis wrote:
| It's a security issue to have a goo.gl domain that redirects to
| arbitrary pages. Attackers can find goo.gl links that go to
| expired domains, register them, and then they have a goo.gl
| link to use in phishing attacks.
|
| Giving the domain to a 3rd party is not going to happen.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| So it was already a security issue for goo.gl to exist in
| first place?
|
| The point is whether Google considered any other options than
| keep operating it or burning everything to the ground. Google
| could also keep the domain and let users reach a intermediary
| landing page of the Internet Archive first
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| Google won't do this IMO because that's all user data. A user
| submitted the pairing between the key and the value. If they
| released an entire database of user data they would run afoul
| of data privacy regulations.
|
| They could possibly provide a GCP service where you make an
| authenticated request to look up the value of a given goo.gl
| key. That would mitigate fishing concerns, eliminate the
| pressure of running a productionized legacy service, and allow
| the to do use quotas etc to tamp down on abuse. But that also
| would be covered by the regulatory laws and I don't know what
| they say about such a thing.
| gkoberger wrote:
| I'm against link rot and I hate how Google doesn't maintain old
| projects. But this is one shutdown I 100% agree with.
|
| Having an official Google domain that anyone can hijack is
| dangerous, given that many people's main internet identity is
| GMail (aka their Google account). I know anyone can create an
| offshoot (goooogle.org, etc), but Google was using goo.gl too.
|
| It was easy to redirect a goo.gl to a Google login page (which is
| on a real Google domain), and trick people into authorizing
| access to their account.
|
| I consider myself savvy, and I got a pretty convincing one
| recently. The email looked legit, and the link was a goo.gl link
| that ultimately landed me on a legitimate Google login page. It
| didn't trick me, but it did take me a few minutes to figure out
| how it wasn't legit.
|
| NOTE: This article is kinda misleading. They already stopped
| letting people add new links in 2019. And now, they're only
| removing "inactive" links, AKA links that had no activity since
| 2024. If you visit a link right now, it will be kept. Here's more
| info: https://blog.google/technology/developers/googl-link-
| shorten...
| akersten wrote:
| > Having an official Google domain that anyone can hijack is
| dangerous,
|
| This makes me wonder if they're retiring sites.google.com any
| time soon?
| jszymborski wrote:
| I think it's pretty easy to make an argument against URL
| shorteners, but I think it's a bit harder to defend killing
| existing short links. Stop new links from being minted, keep up
| a "Report Abuse" page, maybe even scan the existing DB for
| Google Login look-alikes. The upkeep is as much or less than
| responsibly running a URL short link site in the first place.
|
| Instead, they're just disappearing _all_* goo.gl short links.
| The overwhelming majority of which are benign links made by
| users who were promised a super stable URL link shortening
| service backed by the Google brand.
|
| *edit: Not all, but nearly.
| striking wrote:
| Not all.
|
| > All other [active] goo.gl links will be preserved and will
| continue to function as normal. To check if your link will be
| retained, visit the link today. If your link redirects you
| without a message, it will continue to work.
|
| https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-url-shortener-
| li...
| jszymborski wrote:
| This is true. An enormous number links are going to die,
| however.
| procaryote wrote:
| I guess there's a tiny chance they'll learn to A: not trust
| google to keep anything alive, or B: not use link shorteners?
| Guillaume86 wrote:
| Most of the time it's not the people who created the link
| who are going be annoyed with the broken link...
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Stop new links from being minted
|
| They already did this in 2019.
|
| The service has been deprecated for a very long time.
|
| > Instead, they're just disappearing _all_ goo.gl short links
|
| This is false. They are sunsetting inactive links.
| jszymborski wrote:
| I know its been deprecated. I'm just saying that they could
| have stopped it there.
|
| It is true that it is not _all_ links, apologies.
| "Inactive" here is defined as "not visited in 2024" which
| is a crazy small envelope. I wouldn't be surprised if
| nearly all links were deleted.
| troupo wrote:
| They were going to shut down the service entirely until a
| public outcry.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I fully agree. Official looking redirect URLs are a dream come
| true for scams and phishing attacks.
|
| The goo.gl link shortener hasn't accepted new links for many
| years. Over 99% of the links had no recent activity. The play
| was to scrape the web for old goo.gl links that went to expired
| domains, register the domain, and then you have a goo.gl URL
| that you can send wherever you want, indefinitely.
|
| Nearly all of the angry blog posts, Tweets, and HN comments
| missed this and jumped to the conclusion that it was purely a
| cost cutting measure, but link official-looking open redirect
| URLs are a big deal in the security space.
| jszymborski wrote:
| > Over 99% of the links had no recent activity.
|
| "Recent" is defined within the last year. If the Wayback
| Machine adopted this logic, it would be useless.
|
| The security concerns were largely addressed by not accepting
| new links. This was a cost cutting measure, plain and simple.
| I think we all agree that a goo.gl shortener was a terrible
| idea to begin with, and my blog post even shows evidence that
| folks knew this was a bad idea at launch.
| da_chicken wrote:
| Yeah, and I question how much cost they're saving. Just how
| much storage do you need for a URI redirect? How much are
| you spending to have a record that isn't being used?
|
| It would make sense if they were pruning links whose
| TARGETS were no longer responding. But all the unused links
| are costing essentially nothing. Essentially all the cost
| was spent already.
| ruds wrote:
| The security concerns were not addressed by not accepting
| new links. As the post you replied to said,
|
| > The play was to scrape the web for old goo.gl links that
| went to expired domains, register the domain, and then you
| have a goo.gl URL that you can send wherever you want,
| indefinitely.
| pinum wrote:
| Instead of shutting down completely, why not this:
|
| For goo.gl links that were created by google, continue
| redirecting them as normal. For others, show a warning page
| explaining to the user that the link wasn't created (or vouched
| for) by google. If they press an "agree" button, still don't
| show a clickable link, but instead show it as plain text to be
| copied.
| gkoberger wrote:
| Yeah, this is sorta what's already happening. They stopped
| new links years ago, and are only removing "inactive" links
| now.
| amelius wrote:
| Can't they just show a warning screen containing a button "I
| accept the risk"?
| thesuitonym wrote:
| It always seemed strange to me that people would use a link
| shortener (that they didn't own!) for anything other than
| Twitter, or the small use-case of manually typing a URL into a
| different computer that you couldn't sync in some other way. In
| what way was this not the obvious outcome?
| webstrand wrote:
| So if the issue is `goo.gl` is useful for phising, why not shut
| it down and leave a readonly copy on some other domain? Sure it
| still breaks every link, but for people who are in-the-know can
| use the alternate domain by manually translating it.
| anoncow wrote:
| I don't think the reason is phishing. The reason is they will
| save money and who cares about people who are using it.
| amelius wrote:
| Step 1: make everyone use your url shortener
|
| Step 2: shut it down
|
| Step 3: make every link redirect to an advertisement
|
| Step 4: profit
| hk1337 wrote:
| It probably should never have been for public use, make it for
| official Google links only.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| I've never quite understood URL shorteners. They seem like a way
| of opting into link rot and sending tracking data to third
| parties who aren't necessary for the client-server connection.
|
| Is there a major benefit I'm missing? I could kind of see them if
| you have a character limit, want to hide the URL, or have to type
| a URL manually. But manual typing is rare, and even microblogging
| services are expanding character limits. Hiding the URL seems
| slightly sketchy, but you can achieve it without a shorter URL so
| maybe that's not a real benefit.
|
| Anyway, I'm actually curious about this because people seem to
| love them.
|
| (and this is aside from all the very valid issues and concerns
| people have with Google shutting down a widely used service).
| mariotacke wrote:
| One use-case I found somewhat reasonable is to shorten to embed
| the URL in a smaller QR code, especially ones with lots of
| parameters.
| moolcool wrote:
| > But manual typing is rare
|
| It's absolutely not rare. I can't tell you how many times I sat
| in the back of a classroom, squinting at a whiteboard, trying
| to type copy a URL that looked like this:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/technology/silicon-chips-...
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| "Rare" doesn't mean "non-existent". Some people (such as
| yourself) might indeed need to type links in manually on a
| regular basis, but for most people it is quite rare.
| kmoser wrote:
| Not saying you're wrong, just wondering if it was an option
| to take a picture of the screen using your phone. In my
| experience, that's how students tend to capture such info
| when it isn't provided to them electronically.
| const_cast wrote:
| I think more important than URL shorteners is URL structure.
| It should work like a directory, where you can intuitively
| guess what subdirectories there are.
|
| This NYT link is actually pretty good.
| year/month/day/category/title is pretty nice. The query
| parameter ruins it, but that's kind of unavoidable if you
| want a reproducible link with extra data. Usually you can
| omit query parameters and the URL should still work.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| For an internal organization filled with non-technical users
| (most), link shorteners are very useful. Each shortlink has an
| owner, it can have delegates with edit capability, full history
| is shown to the entire organization.
|
| go/holidays = holiday schedule
|
| go/itrequest
|
| go/ithelpdesk
|
| go/corpcalendar
|
| go/fsckyourself = self-service filesystem healthchecks
|
| ---
|
| yes, it is still a little chaotic, and no, it should not be a
| complete substitute for a well-indexed corporate directory. But
| it is a really useful shortcut generator for the people that
| are good at memorizing them, and it costs little to operate
| internally. Every place that I've worked at that didn't have
| one, I wish had one.
| pythonaut_16 wrote:
| Go links are a specific subset of short links with a slightly
| different purpose than services like goo.gl.
|
| And more organizations should adopt them because they are
| great.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| it makes QR codes smaller. /s
| skwirl wrote:
| They are useful for putting URLs in print materials like books.
| Useful for sharing very long links in IRC and some other text
| based chat apps (many google maps links would span multiple IRC
| lines if not shortened, for example). They are good for making
| more easily scannable QR codes.
| pythonaut_16 wrote:
| QR Codes is the main case I've looked at where the shorter link
| makes a difference in the complexity (and therefore
| scannability) of the generated code.
|
| But otherwise I think it's about traffic and tracking.
|
| First in that you can track visitors to the short link, perhaps
| in a more centralized place if your org has multiple systems or
| if you're linking to sites you don't otherwise control. And
| secondly it's used when tacking on tons of query parameters
| that would otherwise make it too long even with expanded
| character limits. And just aesthetically a short link might be
| more aesthetic in your post.
|
| Imagine seeing "link.short/abcd1234" vs
| "linksrus.corporate/blog/2025/08/12/the-title-of-our-
| post.html?utm=something&some-other-tracking-
| param=abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz&even-more-data-in-the-
| url&some-hashed-value=QXNoIG5hemcgZHVyYmF0dWzDu2ssCiAgIGFzaCBuY
| XpnIGdpbWJhdHVsLApBc2ggbmF6ZyB0aHJha2F0dWzDu2sKICAgYWdoIGJ1cnp1
| bS1pc2hpIGtyaW1wYXR1bAoKT25lIHJpbmcgdG8gcnVsZSB0aGVtIGFsbCwKICA
| gb25lIHJpbmcgdG8gZmluZCB0aGVtLApPbmUgcmluZyB0byBicmluZyB0aGVtIG
| FsbAogICBhbmQgaW4gdGhlIGRhcmtuZXNzIGJpbmQgdGhlbS4KCg"
| jtbayly wrote:
| The reasons I've used them are related to easy tracking of
| stats. Which (short)links I created to this page are producing
| traffic?
|
| Of course, this is possible in other ways, but note that I
| said, "easy". ;)
| dkiebd wrote:
| It used to be that characters in urls would count for the
| character limit in tweets. So people would use shorteners to be
| able to fit more stuff in a tweet.
| xmprt wrote:
| I never used them for shortening the URL but it helped to give
| a human understandable name to a link. For example, if I'm
| linking to a Google Doc, then I can either share the base64(?)
| link that Google autogenerates, or share short.link/insert-
| name-here.
| cxr wrote:
| It's Conway's law again. Orgs could mint and maintain uptime
| for short/memorable permalinks hosted on their own domains, but
| the Web has been captured by a professional class with
| predilections and goals all their own and which are rarely
| aligned with the org and the people/purpose it serves.
| benwills wrote:
| URL shorteners significantly increased in popularity as Twitter
| did. There was originally a 140 character limit that became
| quite squeezed when adding most URLs, especially to blog posts
| where the title is part of the URL.
|
| Later, adding things like analytics and tracking (eg: not just
| in social media, but also in email campaigns) became another
| reason to use them, especially for those less tech inclined.
| o11c wrote:
| Historically there were a _lot_ of CMS 's with very small
| character limits. I remember a war between my high school
| teachers trying to make their pages work, and the IT department
| trying to ban all URL shorteners categorically (which
| admittedly I never understood, given that the DNS interceptor
| should be able to catch the redirected domain)
| alexvitkov wrote:
| Conspiracy: They're shutting it down so competitors' AI and
| search crawlers can't visit the links, but theirs can, since
| archiving efforts aside only they have the DB.
|
| Given that it doesn't make money, it has zero value alive and at
| least epsilon value dead. Plus they don't need the links to work
| to collect metrics.
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _Google shifts goo.gl policy: Inactive links deactivated, active
| links preserved_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44759918
| - Aug 2025 (189 comments)
|
| _Google 's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44683481 - July 2025 (222
| comments)
|
| _Google URL Shortener links will no longer be available_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40998549 - July 2024 (49
| comments)
|
| _Ask HN: Google is sunsetting goo.gl on 3 /30. What will be your
| URL shortener?_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19385433 -
| March 2019 (14 comments)
|
| _Tell HN: Goo.gl (Google link Shortener) is shutting down_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16902752 - April 2018 (45
| comments)
|
| _Google is shutting down its goo.gl URL shortening service_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16722817 - March 2018 (56
| comments)
|
| _Transitioning Google URL Shortener to Firebase Dynamic Links_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16719272 - March 2018 (53
| comments)
| swills wrote:
| Might I suggest that instead of linking to the article at
| theatlantic.com you instead link to the archive.org archive of
| it? I couldn't visit it due to Cloudflare thinking IPv6 is the
| devil and then still couldn't read it due to the paywall. Here's
| the archive.org link that sorta works for me, until their
| JavaScript removes the majority of the page content shortly after
| loading:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250527052607/https://www.theat...
| perdomon wrote:
| What is this container doing exactly? Sequentially visiting every
| possible goo.gl link, seeing if it points somewhere, and saving
| that full URL if so?
| johtso wrote:
| The project dashboard is great, you can see all the work that's
| being done in real-time: https://tracker.archiveteam.org:1338/
| moomin wrote:
| A small thing that drives me up the wall:
|
| * Microsoft has code that references a URL shorterner
|
| * The URL shortener is in-house and points to a Microsoft
| property.
|
| * However, the documentation team don't keep this stuff up to
| date, resulting in you getting error messages containing a broken
| link.
|
| You would have thought it would be more than possible for
| Microsoft to keep their own house in order.
| opentokix wrote:
| URL shorteners should not have existed in the first place.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Mostly agreed... I understand it's easier to print
| http://foo.bar/123 than
| http://markettingsite.com/?campain=xyz&... But there's
| absolutely nothing stopping every website from hosting their
| own.
|
| It's mostly for print usage anyway.. and with all the TLDs out
| there now, you can definitely still get some short options. I
| literally have one strictly for (reverse)dns for my server(s).
| Another for my mail server, separate from the domains the
| server hosts.
|
| Also, hosting your own means you don't have to worry about
| being associated with externalized spam links. Of course, if
| you are a spammer, then it works even better for users that
| will block you.,
| nfriedly wrote:
| I let the ArchiveTeam Warrior docker run in the background on my
| file server, configured to contribute to whichever project
| archiveteam picks. When I first set it up, that was archiving
| telegram channels, but I took a peak yesterday and it was backing
| up goo.gl links. Apparently I've uploaded 94gb's worth of links
| already.
| tedchs wrote:
| My question is, why can Google themselves not just provide a dump
| to archive.org themselves? Having volunteer middlemen doing the
| work seems like an artificial crisis.
| perdomon wrote:
| It seems like Google doesn't want a single machine visiting so
| many links in such a short time. I wonder what the "bad response"
| could be? Google asks for a login, sleeping 20
| minutes. Server returned bad response. Sleeping 8
| seconds. 635=302 https://images.google.com.pk/imgres?imgu
| rl=http://www.pakiboutique.com/wp-content/gallery/zainab-
| chottani-pret-collection-2017/zainab-chottani-luxury-
| pret-2017-7.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.pakiboutique.com/zainab-
| chottani-pret-collection-2017&docid=0gx_lzfAk8YInM&tbnid=qKdQuVyB
| bOHJfM:&w=948&h=1280&source=sh/x/im Google asks for
| a login, sleeping 20 minutes. Server returned bad
| response. Sleeping 11 seconds. 636=302 https://images.goo
| gle.com.pk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.pakiboutique.com/wp-
| content/gallery/zainab-chottani-pret-collection-2017/zainab-
| chottani-luxury-
| pret-2017-7.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.pakiboutique.com/zainab-
| chottani-pret-collection-2017&docid=0gx_lzfAk8YInM&tbnid=qKdQuVyB
| bOHJfM:&w=948&h=1280&source=sh/x/im Google asks for
| a login, sleeping 20 minutes. Server returned bad
| response. Sleeping 29 seconds. 637=302 https://images.goo
| gle.com.pk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.pakiboutique.com/wp-
| content/gallery/zainab-chottani-pret-collection-2017/zainab-
| chottani-luxury-
| pret-2017-7.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.pakiboutique.com/zainab-
| chottani-pret-collection-2017&docid=0gx_lzfAk8YInM&tbnid=qKdQuVyB
| bOHJfM:&w=948&h=1280&source=sh/x/im
| rkagerer wrote:
| Not sure why anyone would trust Google to this given their track
| record...
| p3rls wrote:
| At the same time, google also promotes backlinks to the point
| where domains are bought up for $10k+ sometimes just to give it a
| redirect to a gambling site
|
| Mousewheel through last years auctions on
| https://x.com/namemaxicom and can see how broken the entire
| system is from top to bottom.
| fudged71 wrote:
| I just sent my Manus agent to run this across 20 instances.
| Interesting to see how many instances failed installation.
|
| Anyone know why these would return " Google asks for a login,
| sleeping 20 minutes."?
| kazinator wrote:
| Google applications are still handing out goo.gl links.
|
| If you go to Google Maps right now, drop a pin, and right lick to
| Share This Location you get a goo.gl link:
|
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/mPMvmv3dJDsLGvtF9
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-08-12 23:01 UTC)