goo.gl is killing billions of shortlinks

Remember goo.gl, Google’s public link shortener that disabled the ability to create new links in 2019? ..well:

Any developers using links built with the Google URL Shortener in the form https://goo.gl/* will be impacted, and these URLs will no longer return a response after August 25th, 2025.

…so, Google is planning on shutting down the service entirely, killing all shortlinks made before 2019 (keep in mind that Google is still using this domain for Google Maps share links, these won’t be killed.. for now).. which is definitely a shame. As goo.gl was a very popular link shortener, there are many shortlinks created with it that’ll no longer work. Link rot is real.

Meet the ArchiveTeam

The ArchiveTeam is composed of a bunch of volunteers that have an interest in digital preservation. One of their current ongoing projects is URLTeam, in which they’re trying to archive as many links from link shorteners as possible. Their tracker for the project currently shows about 175 different link shorteners.

And you can help!

Using the ArchiveTeam’s “Warrior”, you can help their project by contributing some of your bandwidth. It’s as easy as installing VirtualBox, downloading their virtual machine image, going to http://localhost:8001, choosing a username and picking what project you want to work on.

I’ve personally deployed Warrior on one of my servers and picked goo.gl, as it’s the most important project in the list right now (..and ArchiveTeam’s Choice also currently picks it automatically)

If you prefer containerization over virtual machines, you can also use their docker image to run Warrior. I’d just highly encourage using any of the mentioned methods to help preserve links that would otherwise be lost to time.