Comment on Google’s shortened links will stop working next year
ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.com 3 months ago
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…
hedgehog@ttrpg.network 3 months ago
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).
ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.com 3 months ago
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 use it…
hedgehog@ttrpg.network 3 months ago
I don’t know for sure, but that’s the scale I would expect (billions) and the number came from seroundtable.com/google-goo-gl-urls-to-404-37758.…
ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.com 3 months ago
Ah, yes, I’m off by a lot then, thanks!