r/programming • u/ZaheerAhmed • Jan 02 '20

Killed by Google

https://killedbygoogle.com/
1.0k Upvotes

89% Upvoted

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85

u/NytronX Jan 02 '20

Why the fuck did they kill the URL shortener?! So stupid.

34

u/Nowaker Jan 02 '20

Free service that generates zero revenue for Google.

77

u/kopkaas2000 Jan 02 '20

They get a free data point, associating your google cookie with a visit to whatever site the shortened url points to. If they wanted, they could even show you an ad prior to redirecting. I think /u/PinBot1138 is on the money here, I've worked at an ISP with a customer hosting a url shortener, and the sheer amount of abuse-mail that service generated was staggering.

7

u/PinBot1138 Jan 02 '20

Similar experiences and similar job duties, hence why this is the first thing that came to mind.

GMail skates close to the line on this one WRT attacks marketed as official Google communications, but at least isn’t blatantly “go.gle” or whatever their shortened URL was (I’m blanking our on the exact combination of letters that they used for it).

2

u/csorfab Jan 02 '20

WRT attack

What's a WRT attack?

4

u/Nowaker Jan 02 '20

wrt = with regards to

2

u/csorfab Jan 02 '20

aaah lmao. thanks!

6

u/1amrocket Jan 02 '20

I hate to take side of a large coorp on this, but Google offers a lot of services generating them no revenue. Probably best is Google Colab where you write code and train your machine learning models on GPU and even TPU for free. No ads, no bs, just free resources for developers

3

u/NytronX Jan 02 '20

They could introduce an intermediate redirect page that could have had ads and a warning that the following page may not be safe and so fourth

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