I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some service that gave out shortened links by default and people just used those everywhere. Lots of people are clueless about how URLs work, and authoring HTML often means filling in a form.
I skim this page every time it is posted, but this time scrolling the whole length of it even as fast as I can gave me depression. 295 projects, almost half of them killed in the last 5 years.
I don’t think any other company is based on trial and error to the same degree as Google.
It’s kind of funny, since Google was originally based on hiring the greatest capacities within their field. So you should think they were pretty smart.
But trial and error is actually the LEAST INTELLIGENT method to solve a problem.
A combination of browser settings and exceptionally rare usage of short link providers - as creator or user - means I'm not completely sure about this, but ... were they putting ads on the short links somehow?
Because I figure if they weren't they should have tried that.
And if they were, how expensive is running a short link service anyway? This feels like rummaging around in the sofa for loose change. Smacks of desperation.
I’ve only ever seen goog.le looks used in spam and phishing emails, so I’m not particularly sad about this
Of course, there’s roughly eighty million other folks who think they’ve each done a short link provider better, somehow, so this won’t make much of a difference beyond not relying on the bots at Google to deal with abuse problems.