Google URL Shortener
» see goo.gl as it lived, on the wayback machine
~ the goodbye ~
i used goo.gl a lot around 2012. it lived in the gmail compose box and the google docs share menu. every blogger embed defaulted to it. clicking the share button on a google product gave you a goo.gl link by default, which is how it got everywhere without ever needing a marketing budget.
google launched goo.gl on 14 december 2009 as a toolbar feature. the public site at goo.gl came in september 2010, when google opened it up as a standalone service for any url, not just google ones. analytics were the differentiator. paste a goo.gl link, click into the dashboard, see country and referrer data on every click.
by 2015 it was the default short link inside every google property. google search results pages had a goo.gl share button. the android share sheet defaulted to goo.gl. bit.ly was still bigger as a brand but google had the larger pipe.
~ the chronicle ~
| Born | 14 December 2009 inside the Google Toolbar |
|---|---|
| Peak | default short link for every Google search result share, Docs file, and Blogger embed 2010-2018 |
| Killed | 25 August 2025, when goo.gl stopped resolving |
| Lifespan | 15 years 8 months |
| Made by | |
| Killed by | deprecation in favor of Firebase Dynamic Links |
~ how it died ~
on 13 april 2018 google stopped accepting new users for goo.gl, pointing developers at firebase dynamic links instead. firebase dynamic links promised app-deep-linking on top of url shortening. for normal short-link users this was useless complexity, and google knew it.
on 30 march 2019 the dashboard went away. the links still resolved, but you could no longer create new ones. existing links stayed alive in a holding pattern for six more years.
the final death came on 25 august 2025. google announced in july 2024 that goo.gl links with no recent activity would stop resolving. then in august 2025 the company adjusted the policy to preserve actively-used links and kill the rest. either way, most of the goo.gl corpus stopped working that day.
~ what got buried with it ~
fifteen years of email threads, slack messages, blog post embeds, and academic citations went 404 on 25 august 2025. archived versions on wayback machine often survived. the live web did not. anyone who ran a community forum from 2010 to 2020 is now reading old threads with broken footnotes.
firebase dynamic links, the official replacement, was itself deprecated by google in november 2024 with an end-of-service date of 25 august 2025. google killed the original and its successor on the same day. the recommendation now is "use a third-party service" which is what users were doing before goo.gl existed.
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