Google shifts goo.gl policy: Inactive links deactivated, active links preserved
161 comments
·August 1, 2025jasonpeacock
borg16
i read in an earlier thread for this on HN - "this is a classic example of data driven product decision" aka we can reduce costs by $x if we just stopped goo.gl links. Instead of actually wondering how this would impact the customers.
Also helps that they are in a culture which does not mind killing services on a whim.
Aurornis
The Google URL shortener stopped accepting new links around 2018. It has been deprecated for a long time.
I doubt it was a cost-driven decision on the basis of running the servers. My guess would be that it was a security and maintenance burden that nobody wanted.
They also might have wanted to use the domain for something else.
cogman10
How much of a burden could this really be?
The nature of something like this is that the cost to run it naturally goes down over time. Old links get clicked less so the hardware costs would be basically nothing.
As for the actual software security, it's a URL shortener. They could rewrite the entire thing in almost no time with just a single dev. Especially since it's strictly hosting static links at this point.
It probably took them more time and money to find inactive links than it'd take to keep the entire thing running for a couple of years.
rdtsc
> I doubt it was a cost-driven decision on the basis of running the servers. My guess would be that it was a security and maintenance burden that nobody wanted.
Yeah I can't imagine it being a huge cost saver? But guessing that the people who developed it long moved on, and it stopped being a cool project. And depending on the culture inside Google it just doesn't pay career-wise to maintain someone else's project.
JimDabell
> My guess would be that it was a security and maintenance burden that nobody wanted.
Cloudflare offered to run it and Google turned them down:
mort96
Documents from 2018 haven't decayed or somehow become irrelevant.
rany_
I really doubt it was about security/maintenance burdens. Under the hood, goo.gl just uses Firebase Dynamic Links which is still supported by Google.
Edit: nevermind, I had no idea Dynamic Links is deprecated and will be shutting down.
dangus
I think the problem with URL shorteners like Google’s that includes the company name is that to the layperson there is possibly an implied level of safety.
Here is a service that basically makes Google $0 and confuses a non-zero amount of non-technical users when it sends them to a scam website.
Also, in the age of OCR on every device they make basically no sense. You can take a picture of a long URL on a piece of paper then just copy and paste the text instantly. The URL shortener no longer serves a discernible purpose.
EGreg
How much does it really cost google to answer some quick HTTP requests and redirect, vs all their youtube videos etc
resize2996
"security and maintenance burden" == "cost" == "cost-driven decision"
jerlam
Goo.gl didn't have customers, it had users. Customers pay, either with money or their personal data, now or the future. Goo.gl did not make any money or have a plan to do so in the future.
CydeWeys
One wonders why they don't, instead of showing down, display a 15s interstitial unskippable YouTube-style ad prior to redirecting.
That way they'll make money, and they can fund the service not having to shut down, and there isn't any linkrot.
franga2000
The monetary value of the goodwill and mindshare generated by such a free service is hard to calculate, but definitely significant. I wouldn't be surprised if it was more than it costs to run.
somat
I always figured most of the real value of these url hashing services was as an marketing tracking metric. That is, sort of equivalent to the "share with" widgets provided that conveniently also dump tons of analytics to the services.
I will be honest I was never in an environment that would benefit from link shortening, so I don't really know if any end users actually wanted them (my guess twitter mainly) and always viewed these hashed links with extreme suspicion.
thevillagechief
One of the complaints about Google is that it's difficult to launch products due to bureaucracy. I'm starting to thing that's not a bad thing. If they'd done a careful analysis of the cost of jumping into this url-shortener bandwagon, we wouldn't be here. Maybe it's not a bad thing they move slower now.
margalabargala
I would bet that the salaries paid to the product managers behind shutting this down, during the time they worked on shutting it down, outweigh the annual cost of running the service by an order of magnitude.
observationist
At this point, anyone depending on Google for anything deserves to get burned. I don't know how much more clearly they could tell their users that Google has absolutely no respect for users without drone shipping boxes of excrement.
Imustaskforhelp
If companies can spend billions on AI and not have anything in return and be okay with that in the ways of giving free stuff (okay, I'll admit not completely free since you are the product but still free)
Then they should also be okay for keeping the goo.gl links honestly.
Sounds kinda bad for some good will but this is literally google, the one thing google is notorious for is killing their products.
citizenpaul
This is basically modern SV business. This old data is costing us about a million a year to hold onto. KILL IT NOW WITH FIRE.
Hey lets also dump 100 Billion dollars into this AI thing without any business plan or ideas to back it up this year. HOW FAST CAN YOU ACCEPT MY CHECK!
manquer
Hard to imagine costs were ever a factor.
For company running GCP and giving things like Colab TPUs free the costs of running a URL service would be trivial rounding number at best
no_wizard
Arguably, this is them collecting the wrong types of data to inform decisions, if that isn't represented in the data.
miohtama
For all HN commenters: if you are not paying for it, you are not a customer and thus you should not complain.
troupo
> How did they think the links were being used?
Can't dig this document up right now, but in their Chrome dev process they say something along these lines: "even if a ferie is used by 0.01% of users, at scale that's a lot of users . Don't remove until you've made solely due impost is negligible".
At Google scale I'm surprised [1] this is not applied everywhere.
[1] Well, not that surprised
cnst
Yup, 0.01% of users at scale is indeed a lot of users.
This is exactly why many big companies like Amazon, Google and Mozilla still support TLSv1.0, for example, whereas all the fancy websites would return an error unless you're using TLSv1.3 as if their life depends on it.
In fact, I just checked a few seconds ago with `lynx`, and Google Search even still works on plain old HTTP without the "S", too — no TLS required whatsoever to start with.
Most people are very surprised by this revelation, and many don't even believe it, because it's difficult to reproduce this with a normal desktop browser, apart from lynx.
But this also shows just out how out of touch Walmart's digital presence really is, because somehow they deem themselves to be important enough to mandate TLSv1.2 and the very latest browsers unlike all the major ecommerce heavyweights, and deny service to anyone who doesn't have the latest device with all the latest updates installed, breaking even the slightly outdated browsers even if they do support TLSv1.2.
rs186
I guess the number of people who use Chrome to access files via FTP must be below 0.01% then.
https://www.auslogics.com/en/articles/is-it-bad-that-google-...
charcircuit
One that is operating in an environment where strict privacy laws exist. User data stuck in legacy systems is a liability.
Not only are things evolving internally within Google, laws are evolving externally and must be followed.
ChrisArchitect
So bizarre. Embedded links, docs, social posts, stuff that could be years and years old, and they're expecting traffic to them recently? Why do they seem to think their link shortener is only being used for like someone's social profile linktree or something. Some marketing person's bizarre view of how the web is being used.
cellover
tail -f access.log maybe?
neilv
"Actively used" criteria scrods that critical old document you found, in which someone trusted it was safe to use a Google link.
Not knowing all the details motivating this surprising decision, from the outside, I'd expect this to be an easy "Don't Be Evil" call:
"If we don't want to make new links, we can stop taking them (with advance warning, for any automation clients). But we mustn't throw away this information that was entrusted to us, and must keep it organized/accessible. We're Google. We can do it. Oddly, maybe even with less effort than shutting it down would take."
inetknght
> someone trusted it was safe to use a Google link.
That someone made a poor decision to rely on anything made by Google.
progval
Hindsight is 20/20. Google was considered by geeks to be a very reliable company at some point.
wolrah
Using a link shortener for any kind of long-term link, no matter who hosts it, has never been a good idea. They're for ephemeral links shared over limited mediums like SMS or where a human would have to manually copy the link from the medium to the browsing device like a TV ad. If you put one in a document intended for digital consumption you've already screwed up.
neilv
Yeah, when Google was founded, people acted like they were normal smart and benevolent and forward-thinking Internet techies (it was a type), and they got a lot of support and good hires because of that.
Then, even as that was eroding, they were still seen as reliable, IIRC.
The killedbygoogle reputation was more recent. And still I think isn't common knowledge among non-techies.
And even today, if you ask a techie which companies have certain reliability capabilities, Google would be at the top of some lists (e.g., keeping certain sites running under massive demand, and securing data against attackers).
kmeisthax
> Oddly, maybe even with less effort than shutting it down would take.
Google has a number of internal processes that effectively make it impossible to run legacy code without an engineering team just to integrate breaking upstream API changes, of which there are many. Imagine Google as an OS, and every few years you need to upgrade from, say, Google 8 to Google 9, and there's zero API or ABI stability so you have to rewrite every app built on Google. Everyone is on an upgrade treadmill. And you can't decide not to get on that treadmill either because everything built at Google is expected to launch at scale on Google's shitty[0]-ass infrastructure.
[0] In the same sense that Intel's EDA tools were absolutely fantastic when they made them and are holding the company back now
hirsin
The worst case is when this mentality of "just update your code" leaks out to the rest of us. I'm still scarred from some of the samesite shenanigans, breaking useful (not ads) boxed software because they figured everyone on the internet could "just update" their websites within six months of them putting out a dev blog post.
It's just not an accurate view of how the world works.
userbinator
"Those who control the past control the present. Those who control the present control the future."
Look at what happened to their search results over the years and you'll understand.
userbinator
Ironically, the voting pattern on my comment demonstrates the point exactly.
shuuji3
By running ArchiveTeam Warrior workers, you can help archive links to Internet Archive. See details in the previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44684119
raybb
Bummer they still don't support running on ARM computers (M1 Macs)
modeless
What purpose does "deactivating" any serve?
MajimasEyepatch
It may help prevent linkjacking. If an old URL no longer works, but the goo.gl link is still available, it's possible that someone could take over the URL and use it for malicious. Consider a scenario like this:
1. Years ago, Acme Corp sets up an FAQ page and creates a goo.gl link to the FAQ.
2. Acme goes out of business. They take the website down, but the goo.gl link is still accessible on some old third-party content, like social media posts.
3. Eventually, the domain registration lapses, and a bad actor takes over the domain.
4. Someone stumbles across a goo.gl link in a reddit thread from a decade ago and clicks it. Instead of going to Acme, they now go to a malicious site full of malware.
With the new policy, if enough time has passed without anyone clicking on the link, then Google will deactivate it, and the user in step 4 would now get a 404 from Google instead.
dundarious
In this little story, what's the difference if the direct ACME URL was used? What does the goo.gl indirection have to do with anything?
xp84
Goo.gl was a terrible idea in the first place because it lends Google's apparent legitimacy (in the eyes of the average "noob") to unmoderated content that could be malicious. That's probably why they at least stopped allowing new ones to be made. By allowing old ones, they can't rule out the Google brand being used to scam and phish.
e.g. Imagine SMS or email saying "We've received your request to delete your Google account effective (insert 1 hour's time). To cancel your request, just click here and log into your account: https://goo.gl/ASDFjkl
This was a very popular strategy for phishing and it's still possible if you can find old links that go to hosts that are NXDOMAIN and unregistered, of which there are no doubt millions.
mattmaroon
Only insofar as Google might wish to prevent it since their brand was on the shortened url you clicked to get there. And people not having malware is surely good for Google indirectly.
Presumably ACME used the link shortener because they wanted to put the shortened link somewhere, so someone’s going to click things like these. If Google can just delete a lot of it why not?
null
mystifyingpoi
It creates a good entry in the promo package for that Google manager. "Successfully conducted cost saving measure, cutting down the spend on the link shortener service by 70%". Of course, hoping that no one will check the actual numbers.
maven29
A warning shot to guard against an AT&T Bell-style forced divestiture?
imchillyb
I believe this is the simplest and most succinct answer given the current anti monopoly climate the courts and prosecutors have.
42lux
Increasing database ops.
18172828286177
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zarzavat
Do PMs at Google have so much power that they can shut down a product used by billions of people?
afavour
They’re not shutting down a product, they’re removing old links.
I’m not defending it, just that I can absolutely imagine Google PMs making a chart of “$ saved vs clicks” and everyone slapping each other on the back and saying good job well done.
deelowe
They can write the proposals to do so and if it gets picked up by a VP and approved, then they can cite that on their promo.
OutOfHere
The product was shut down a long time ago. They're now deleting inactive data of users.
Retr0id
Presumably, saving disk space on some google servers.
dietr1ch
More than disk space I think they care about having short links, higher cache hit rates and saving RAM on their fleet.
smaudet
I find even this incredibly stingy... Back of the envelope:
1043*1000000000 / (1023^3)
10 4 byte characters times 3 billion links, dividing by 1 GB of memory...
Roughly 111 GB of RAM.
Which is like nothing to a search giant.
To put that into perspective, my Desktop Computer's max Mobo memory is 128 GB, so saying it has to do with RAM is like saying they needed to shut off a couple servers...and save like maybe a thousand dollars.
This reeks of something else, if not just sheer ineptitude...
Retr0id
If they really are only purging the inactive ones, this shouldn't impact cache hit rate much.
nsksl
I don't understand. For you to see the message, you have to click on the link. Your clicking on the link must mean that the link is active, since it is getting clicks. So why is the link being deactivated for being inactive?
skybrian
> showed no activity in late 2024
Apparently they measured it once by running a map-reduce or equivalent.
I don’t see why they couldn’t measure it again. Maybe they don’t want it to be gamed, but why?
poyu
I interpreted "inactive" as the link that the shortener is linking to is not responding.
OutOfHere
No. Inactive means that the short URL hasn't been accessed in a while.
lathiat
If I had to guess it is possibly something to do with fighting crawlers/bots/etc triggering the detection? And running some kind of more advanced logic to try ensure it's really being used. Light captcha style.
But just a guess.
wetpaws
[dead]
dang
Related. Others?
Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44683481 - July 2025 (219 comments)
Google URL Shortener links will no longer be available - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40998549 - July 2024 (49 comments)
xp84
I am pretty sure the terrible idea of putting the Google brand on something that can so easily be used for phishing is the reason they deprecated it in the first place. They should have used something without obvious branding.
quink
And for an encore, I guess they'll start tearing out random pages in the books I didn't happen to read last August?
alpb
This whole thing has 0 cost to Google to run. They could be nice citizens and continue to provide this service for free, but they chose to not to.
Uehreka
“COOL URLS DON’T CHANGE! COOL URLS DON’T CHANGE!!” I continue to insist as I slowly shorten and turn into a bit.ly
mixdup
I'm sure there's some level of security implication, but maybe they could also archive the database of redirect with Archive.org or just release it
jjice
I would've imagined that the good will (or more likely, the lack of bad will) from _not_ doing this would've been worth the cost, considering I can't imagine this has high costs to run.
What amazes me is that this wasn't the original plan. What product manager thinks "the best thing for our customers is to delete their data!".
> We understand these links are embedded in countless documents, videos, posts and more, and we appreciate the input received.
How did they think the links were being used?