All these Google links will disappear soon.. Save them so you don't lose them
Google is not just a search engine, Android and much more. The Internet giant has been around for a very long time, and under its name hides a large number of tools, programs and services thanks to which it was able to become the leader it is now. However, in order to get to where it is, and not lose money, it was necessary to close many services that it provided to users, which did not receive the acceptance they expected. One of them, which we will talk about today, is Goo.gl.
Goo.gl is a service that was launched in 2009. This service provided users with a very easy-to-use way to shorten URLs, it is completely free and linked to our Google account. It is a very useful tool for sharing long URLs with just a few characters. These short URLs also have very useful metrics and analytics to see if users are accessing them or not.
Social networks, like X, use their own shorteners for links posted on them, but Google's service has given users complete freedom to redirect to the URLs they want.
Unfortunately, in 2018, Google announced that the service was coming to an end, although there was no need to worry because all links would continue to work. Unfortunately, it was all a lie.
- End of Google Shortened Links
Although Google confirmed in 2018 that links already created using goo.gl would continue to work, it has been 6 years since then. And now things have changed. As Google tells us on its own blog , the company will start showing notifications starting next month, indicating that the link will stop working in August 2025. That means within a year, all links created in goo.gl will stop working, and we will see a 404 error when we try to access any of them.
The goal is for all users who have used this service before to move to its successor: Firebase Dynamic Links (FDL). The problem is that Google hasn’t made it easy to take all links to the new service at once. Moreover, this alternative is more complicated than its predecessor, because it is designed specifically for developers.