Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Impact on citations, books, and “cultural vandalism”

  • Many comments highlight tens of thousands of academic citations and many book references that will now break, calling this “cultural vandalism” and a hit to scholarly record-keeping.
  • Others push back: many of the counted “goo.gl” references are OCR noise, and many targets likely already 404.
  • Broader point: the episode illustrates how fragile web-based citations are, and how much culture is now dependent on private infrastructure.

Who is to blame? Google vs. users

  • One camp: this is clearly Google’s fault; a trillion‑dollar company could easily keep a read‑only redirect map alive, accept outside hosting offers, or publish a static mapping. Killing it is seen as poor web citizenship and a trust eroder.
  • Another camp: the real “vandalism” was relying on a third‑party URL shortener for long‑term references; authors, publishers, and tech education failed by normalizing this.

Alternatives and best practices for references

  • Suggested approaches for books/papers:
    • Use full URLs plus archiving (Wayback, Memento); avoid shorteners except maybe as secondary convenience.
    • Use dedicated persistence services like perma.cc or DOIs (via Crossref/DataCite/Figshare/Zenodo), though these have access and workflow constraints.
    • For print: QR codes, or just accept that type‑in URLs are clumsy but transparent.
  • General consensus: shorteners are mostly obsolete and risky outside narrow cases.

Archiving efforts and privacy concerns

  • ArchiveTeam is brute‑forcing the goo.gl space with distributed “Warrior” VMs/Docker containers and pushing data to the Internet Archive; billions of URLs are being processed.
  • Common Crawl already has ~10M unique goo.gl links archived.
  • Some propose Google simply publishing a CSV/SQLite of mappings; others note semi‑private “unlisted” content (e.g., shared docs) and confidentiality issues.

Why Google is shutting it down

  • Many doubt infrastructure cost is the real driver; hosting a static redirect map is seen as trivially cheap.
  • Ex‑Googler perspective: the true cost is “ownership” — no team or VP wants to maintain a dead, non‑strategic service in a constantly changing internal platform, and promotions favor new launches over quiet stewardship.
  • Some suggest phishing/abuse and lack of ad revenue as additional motives.

Broader lessons

  • Recurrent theme: “never trust Google for long‑term persistence”; people cite the long list of killed products and view this as another warning.
  • Several zoom out further: the web and URLs themselves are a poor architecture for permanence; without protocol‑level archiving/versioning, a “digital dark age” risk remains.