Mountain View, California — Fed up by sending lengthy Google map urls with 8-million characters? There is no denying it–those Google Maps URLs are shockingly long. Thankfully, search engine giant Google’s latest improvisation is not another “me too” URL shortener, but an actually useful tool for Google Maps. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company has just introduced an in-built “URL shortener” which will now help the users short the urls in Google Maps.
Anyone who has ever tried to send a Google Maps link knows that they can be painfully long. The web addresses of Google Maps that you linked with your friends used to be awfully huge, but thanks to the new integrated URL shortener Google has just solved that problem with a new Labs feature that dramatically shortens Maps URLs.
We entered this address in New York to try the new feature out. With the Short URL feature turned off, our shareable URL for this address was:
“http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=41+11th+St,+New+York,+NY&sll=40.745612,-74.008065&sspn=0.010794,0.020707&g=41+11th+Avenue,+New+York,+NY&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=41+W+11th+St,+New+York,+10011&ll=40.734925,-73.997099&spn=0.002699,0.005177&t=h&z=18.”
When we turned the Labs feature to enable Short URL, it became a simple “http://goo.gl/maps/kKMz.” That is simply better.
To save everyone the hassle of either sending a really, really long URL Google Maps Lab feature present in the Right hand corner of the screen now has an option to change the Labs setting to “Short URL”. Users can enable the feature in the Labs portion of Google Maps. Once enabled, the Short URLs feature will display a smaller URL when you click Link. The URL will begin http://goo.gl/maps.