by Graham Bell
1. November 2010 16:00
Twitter is probably to blame! But Url shorteners are becoming more and more prevalent with a multitude of providers and differing services.
Just a little while ago, tinyurl.com was the king of this realm, but then came a whole host with http://bit.ly often being cited as the market leader. However, now that Google has entered the space, we believe they are well positioned to make an impact in this area. Then again, Twitters http://t.co soon native shortener may well give Google a run for its money.
What do shorteners do?
In basic terms a Url shortener take a large web address and converts it into a manageable length, for example;
http://www.mylongwebsitedomainname.com/somefolder/yetanother/a_long_page_name.php?parameter=long+bit+of+test&anotherparam=evenmore+text
Into something like;
http://shorturl.com/W4f8Jp
All that happens, in this example, is that the shorturl.com website, creates a permanent redirect to the full page.
However, behind the scenes there are 2 things going on;
- Trust is one, the person clicking the short Url must decide to trust the url shortener system. Google is likely to have this trust already. Within the Twitter community, bit.ly and also t.co have the trust already, so Google have a little work to do.
- Protection is where we believe Google will be able to flex their muscles more. Google already verifies its search index against known and pending web threats such as suspected malware, phishing sites and spam sites, so applying this against the shortener system will be easy.
We are switching all tweets to http://goo.gl for the moment and will perhaps look closer at t.co in the future.
