There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

radivojevic ,

Why anyone uses a single Google product, I’ll never know.

SweetCitrusBuzz ,
@SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org avatar

Disclaimer: I don’t use any googlee services myself.

Because it is free, guaranteed to work as long as they keep it running and marketed well.

Plus since they were early into the game of tech online they have many services that all link together.

There aren’t many that will offer most users so little value for ‘free’.

Most alternatives will have some cost if you want as much space as google provides, either the same as google (user data) or monetary (which I semi agree with, hosting isn’t free and I’d rather pay money than with data). However, not everyone is in a position to pay with money and so data is usually what they pay with.

cupcakezealot ,
@cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

what were they used for? internal redirects like t.co? or something for customers? genuine question

tal ,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I’d assume that Google’s value – as with other link-shortening companies – came from being able to add information tracking whenever someone clicked on that link.

If you mean customer value, might be formats where people had limited space to include links like traditional Twitter (which was originally 140 characters in a post, whereas URLs have no specification-mandated character limit).

jarfil ,

Anyone could generate them, for free, and they came with analytics on the side. Google also generated them for sharing content from their services.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_URL_Shortener

mp3 ,
@mp3@lemmy.ca avatar

Looks like I’ll finally have to replace that link in my resume after all.

It was useful to know when a copy of my printed resume was accessed online through the link I added on the footer, at least while the console for it was online.

Midnitte ,

Could do similar things like adding a +resume to your email link

Gork ,

Does Google no longer want to pay for the Greenland .gl TLD?

Moonrise2473 ,

How much money they can save for this?

Probably with the saved money can’t even pay one single day of salary for the CEO

halm ,
@halm@leminal.space avatar

Oh, the CEO’s pay is secure from day one of the fiscal year. They’re trying to pay the cleaning staff with this.

metaStatic ,

What cleaning staff? Cleaning is just another part of your job now, this is purely for the shareholders.

jarfil ,

URL shorteners in general, or just Google?

wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/URLTeam

Goo.gl has a namespace for 10 billion entries, it used to keep tracking/analytics data for each link, with a user interface, and it would happily generate them for stuff like Google Maps links.

How much money would you say it takes to even maintain a system like that, plus update its security, not to mention account for changing web standards, at that scale?

jonne ,

Probably like $50/month in cloud resources if you turned off all the extra stuff and only did redirects and kept it around in read only mode. You’d need to do some dev work up front and price that in as well, obviously.

jarfil ,

$50/month would barely scratch the surface.

Let’s take a conservative approach, and say there are:

  • only 1 billion links
  • each link only points to a URL of up to 100 characters in length on average (some will be 1000 or longer, but let’s hope some are 50 or shorter)
  • less than 10 billion daily hits total (that’s an average of 10/link)
  • the response time should be well under 50ms.

Now you’re looking at 100GB of raw data to put into a database, that needs to return 100K answers/second, in less than 50ms each, worldwide, 24/7.

What is your estimated cloud cost for something like 256GB of RAM, 128 cores, 10Gbps connect, replicated across several zones, and 1TB/day outgoing transfer?

That’s only for the redirect responses in read-only mode, nothing else. You will also need some maintenance to keep it 24/7, for when the server catches fire, or gets obsoleted, and when new exploits come up against your software stack.

OsrsNeedsF2P ,

The dumbest part is like, why? How much work is it really to keep goo.gl links around?

In 2018, Google wanted developers to move to Firebase Dynamic Links that detect the user’s platform and sends them to either the web or an app. Google ended up also shutting down that service for devs.

lmao

jonne ,

Yeah, shouldn’t be too hard to at least keep the existing links working in a read only state.

jarfil ,

How much work is it really to keep goo.gl links around?

A lot.

Goo.gl has a namespace for 10 billion entries, it used to keep tracking/analytics data for each link, with a user interface, and it would happily generate them for links to internal stuff.

Just keeping it running would take some containers of server racks, plus updating the security, accounting for changing web standards, and so on.

Keep in mind this isn’t some self-hosted url shortener with less than a million entries and a peak of 10K users/second, that you can slap onto a random sever and keep it going. It’s a multiple orders of magnitude larger beast, requiring a multi-server architecture just to keep the database, plus more of the same for the analytics, admin interface… and users will expect it to return a result in a fraction of a second, worldwide.

Penguincoder ,

Good analysis, I agree and understand.

Kissaki ,

They could drop all the tracking though and only serve the public redirects. A much simpler product that would retain web links.

Penguincoder ,

GoogLOL

thingsiplay ,

Googlel

Used instead of lol; when you’re too dank for lol

henfredemars ,

Don’t build your online life around Google services.

Beaver ,
@Beaver@lemmy.ca avatar

Switch to Proton, Linux, Librewolf, Matrix, Gimp and Libreoffice.

c0smokram3r ,
@c0smokram3r@midwest.social avatar

I’ve been v curious abt matrix but it’s taken me years to get everyone I care abt on signal 😅

Steve ,

Signal is fine for instant messaging.

Matrix is closer to Discord.

mlaga97 ,

Signal is centralized, closed-source, not-selfhostable and requires being attached to a phone number.

Matrix is decentralized, federated, fully open source with multiple client and server implementations, self-hostable, and does not require being attached to a phone number.

ryannathans ,

Which part of signal is closed source? It no longer requires a phone number, you can use a username

explore_broaden ,

I don’t think the server software is open source.

SweetCitrusBuzz ,
@SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org avatar

Sure, some of those things are accurate (some are accurate-ish). However, there is way more metadata with Matrix than Signal.

To be clear, I use both, but Matrix’ metadata problem bothers me.

thingsiplay ,

killedbygoogle.com

Adanisi ,
@Adanisi@lemmy.zip avatar

Another one for the graveyard!

corbin OP ,

That’s a whole lot of link rot about to happen.

anarchrist ,

The Jedis are going to feel this one

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