Mountain View, California — In an age of compactness with 140-character communication and mobile devices, URL shorteners are a godsend gift. Search engine leader Google’s URL shortener, which, until now, has been closely tied to its existing products, is now debuting as a stand-alone service. The company’s Goo.gl URL shortening service is now open to the world through a new Web site.
The company when initially debuted the service last December as a feature integrated into other Google products, saying that only Google Toolbar and Feedburner users would be able to utilize it to shorten links, and since then has integrated it with Google News, Blogger, and Maps. But the search engine titan now says people will be able to head to goo.gl to input a link from any site and have it shortened. Google’s newly public URL shortener competes with a myriad of other popular services, Bit.ly being the most notable of the bunch.
Goo.gl is now open to all Web users looking for a way to make a Web link shorter. (Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)
However, the search engine giant acknowledges in its announcement that “there are many shorteners out there with great features” but suggests that the Google URL Shortener will be simply and not overloaded with features. That is to say that its product stands out because of its “quality,” stating that “every time you shorten a URL, you know it will work, it will work fast, and it will keep working.” Thus far, Goo.gl has proven to be the “stablest, most secure, and fastest URL shortener on the web.” Google plans to keep it that way.
According to Google Software Engineer Muthu Muthusrinivasan, the Google URL Shortener will provide the following three features:
- Stability: We have had near 100% uptime since our initial launch, and we have worked behind the scenes to make goo.gl even stabler and more robust.
- Security: We have added automatic spam detection based on the same type of filtering technology we use in Gmail.
- Speed: We have more than doubled our speed in just over nine months.
Furthermore, the product also comes with more benefits to users who sign in with a Google Account. For instance, the service will keep a history of shortened URLs. Also, by clicking on “Details” users will be able to get “public, real-time analytics data, complete with traffic over time, top referrers, and visitor profiles for countries, browsers and platforms.”