In the Web world, short is sweet. Google though on an expansion spree with regard to its services, announced on its official blog that it had acquired a URL shortcut – g.co.
Google will be using the short domain as an official link shortening service for its suite of products. Google wants it’s users to be able to trust any g.co link they see, which will always lead to a Google product.
On the plus side, the shorter a URL, the easier it is to share and remember. The other advantage to owning such a URL is you can shorten your service links.
Also, it allows a company to guarantee the security of a link as only they will be able to use that URL. So any short URL beginning g.co will only ever lead to a Google-owned web page.
The search giant has already confirmed that this domain will never be opened up to allow anyone else to shorten their URLs. That means you can visit a g.co shortcut confident you will always end up at a page for a Google product or service.
The downside is that you can’t often be sure which Google website you will be redirected to.
In 2009, Google started using a public link shortening service, goo.gl, that people can use to make their own short links. Links using goo.gl can be used to shorten links from across the web, and aren’t just used for Google products. Google will continue with goo.gl.
Within a year of public selling of domain names, the .co registry is already a very popular destination. The .co domain was created for use by the country Colombia, but anyone can buy a .co domain through public registries such as Godaddy.com. Twitter and Amazon have already acquired T.co and A.co, Z.co and K.co, respectively.
In an interview with Reuters, Juan Diego Calle, the chief executive of the .co domain registry, shared some information about recent .co domain purchases. The highly popular single letter domains (which are not publicly available) are said to now run upwards of 1.5 million dollars per domain. Overstock was able to buy the o.co domain for $350,000, and with prices sky rocketing we can only assume Google paid a pretty penny for the domain.
Google hasn’t made it clear, as yet, exactly how it intends to format the new short URL for its different services.
Whatever the final decision on the rules governing its use on a per service basis, the only important thing for end users to know is this won’t be a short URL that leads to a malware trap like those that can appear on other public short URL services, or even the fake ones setup specifically to help spread spam.