This is a classic product data decision-making fallacy. The right question is "how much total value do all of the links provide", not "what percent are used".
ArchiveTeam is trying to brute force the entire URL space before its too late. You can run a Virtualbox VM/docker image (ArchiveTeam Warrior) to help (unique IPs are needed). I've been running it for a couple months and found a million.
it's not the cost of hosting/sharing it. It's the cost employing people to maintain this alongside other google products.
So, at minimum, assuming there are 2 people maintaining this at google that probably means it would cost them $250k/yr in just payroll to keep this going. That's probably a very low ball estimate on the people involved but it still shows how expensive theses old products can be.
I have only given this a moment's thought, but why not just publish the URL map as a text file or SQLLite DB? So at least we know where they went? I don't think it would be a privacy issue since the links are all public?
I just went through the old thread and it's comments. It appears google didn't specifically state they were going to end the service. They hinted that links would continue working, but new ones would not be able to be created. It was left a bit open-ended, and that likely made people think the links would work indefinitely.
This seems to be echoed by the archiveteam scrambling to get this archived. I figure they would have backed these up years ago if it was more well known.
This is just being a poor citizen of the web, no excuses. Google is a 2 trillion dollar company, keeping these links working indefinitely would probably cost less than what they spend on homepage doodles.
Google’s own services generate goo.gl short URLs (Google Maps generates https://maps.app.goo.gl/ URLs for sharing links to map locations), so I assume this shutdown only affects user-generated short URLs. Google’s original announcement doesn’t say as such, but it is carefully worded to specify that short URLs of the “https://goo.gl/* format” will be shut down.
Google’s probably trying to stop goo.gl URLs from being used for phishing, but doesn’t want to admit that publicly.
That could be an explanation but even so, they could continue to serve the redirects on some other domain so that at the very least people can just change goo.gl to something else and still access whatever the link was to.
> URL Shortener has been a great tool that we’re proud to have built. As we look towards the future, we’re excited about the possibilities of Firebase Dynamic Links
Perhaps relatedly, Google is shutting down Firebase Dynamic Links too, in about a month (2025-08-25).
There seems to have been a recent uptick in phishers using goo.gl URLs. Yes, even without new URLs being accepted by registering expired domains with an old reference.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 65.4 ms ] threadCountless books with irrevocably broken references - https://www.google.com/search?q=%22://goo.gl%22&sca_upv=1&sc...
And for what? The cost of keeping a few TB online and a little bit of CPU power?
An absolute act of cultural vandalism.
For the immeasurable benefits of educating the public.
This is a classic product data decision-making fallacy. The right question is "how much total value do all of the links provide", not "what percent are used".
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior
So, at minimum, assuming there are 2 people maintaining this at google that probably means it would cost them $250k/yr in just payroll to keep this going. That's probably a very low ball estimate on the people involved but it still shows how expensive theses old products can be.
Compiler Explorer and the Promise of URLs That Last Forever (May 2025, 357 points, 189 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44117722
I'm not a google fanboi and the google graveyard is a well known thing, but this has been 6+ years coming.
This seems to be echoed by the archiveteam scrambling to get this archived. I figure they would have backed these up years ago if it was more well known.
Google’s probably trying to stop goo.gl URLs from being used for phishing, but doesn’t want to admit that publicly.
https://killedbygoogle.com
https://x.com/elithrar/status/1948451254780526609
Remember this next time you are thinking of depending upon a Google service. They could have kept this going easily but are intentionally breaking it.
https://9to5google.com/2018/03/30/google-url-shortener-shut-...
> URL Shortener has been a great tool that we’re proud to have built. As we look towards the future, we’re excited about the possibilities of Firebase Dynamic Links
Perhaps relatedly, Google is shutting down Firebase Dynamic Links too, in about a month (2025-08-25).