I Googled the first of these domains and see discussion about whether it’s malware or not. I’ll guess that tinyurl.com isn’t malware per se, but feels free to scribble cookies on your machine in return for providing its wonderful free service.
Looking for an alternative, I tried tiny.cc. It also redirects correctly, but when I try to load the page itself (using a cygwin command url2file) I get no output! What gives?
Are these facilities OK to use? Is there a better alternative? (Other than the intended URL itself – nevermind why I’d prefer not to use that.)
I believe that tiny.cc does its redirecting by returning an HTTP 301 “Permanently Moved”. So there’s no actual page content returned, and your browser knows to navigate to the new location provided.
Tinyurl was one of the first. It has since been eclipsed by bit.ly, Twitter’s default URL shortener. Me, I prefer just having one omniscient overlord, so I use Google’s goo.gl
OK. It looks like this is the way to go. Like tinurl, it lets you specify the link’s name.
I tried these also. goo.gl returns 301 “Permanently Moved” just like tiny.cc, but also returns a very short page with a simple link (in case the 301 error is ignored?)
bit.ly rejected the URL I wanted to encode – perhaps because it’s passing arguments. And neither it, nor goo.gl showed an obvious way to specify the link’s name.
I prefer tinyurl because it’s case insensitive. When you’re giving an address over the phone, you don’t have to worry about “Capital L, small a, capital F, small o, small n, small g.”
There are now many of these URL shortening services. I used to use is.gd for Twitter posts before Twitter built t.co shortening into itself. I have never heard of anyone who uses any of them to shorten a URL of their own having any trouble with them. Using one created by someone else, however, can be problematic. You cannot tell just by looking at the shortened link what site it is going to take you to, so shorteners can be used to disguise links to things such as attack sites.
There can also be reasons to use them. My reasons are not relevant to my question.
goo.gl doesn’t seem to have a way for me to specify the name – did I miss somthing?
I notice you exclude tiny.cc – the one that seemed precisely best of all, as I explained above. Any reason for the exclusion? The “avoid” page you link to makes no special mention of it.
All of those services use a 30x redirect. Bit.ly and Goo.gl have sufficient infrastructure and financial backing to survive a DDoS or recover from a hack. Tinyurl.com has been so widely used for so long that the internet has a vested interest in protecting it. Bit.ly and Tinyurl.com are archived by urlte.am. They’re unlikely to shut down in the foreseeable future.
Tiny.cc seems to be run by one person, and is hosted on a single server. I wasn’t singling it out, just didn’t see anything that recommends it as an ideal choice, or any better than hundreds of others.
tinyurl.com does not do an error redirect. Instead it loads a complex script involving several websites. I assume it collects data and/or sends cookies and is somehow reimbursed by advertisers. This seems like reason not to inflict it on any intended link-clicker (though I suppose similar horrendous scripts and cookies are involved just clicking through a few news stories).
bit.ly does not allow arguments in its result. Did I do something wrong?
Does goo.gl allow the creator to specify the name? Perhaps I need to create an account to do that – I already have several Google accounts and they’re mostly pains-in-the-ass. Tiny.cc does allow user-specified name, no questions asked.
For my simple transient purpose, tiny.cc looks like the best answer. Still, I’m surprised that you made a recommendation while managing to completely ignore my criteria.
Ugh. It looks like Tinyurl.comsometimes sends a 302 redirect, and other times uses in-page meta redirects with Javascript. That seems to have changed in the last couple of months. I saw a 302 when I tested. That’s the trouble here: there’s no way to be sure if a URL shortener might do something different in future, or if they might already do something different for some users.
What do you mean by “arguments in its result”?
I don’t see user-specified names listed in your OP. As far as I know goo.gl won’t do that.
I want (very arbitrary example) tiny.cc/bob-birthday-reminder to point to birthday.com
(The true URL will be visible to anyone who clicks it, but I want to conceal it from search engines. My need isn’t urgent, but as I looked into it I became idly curious. I’ve learned a lot just in this discussion. I wish I knew a good book or website to familiarize myself with Internet complexities – I have a huge variety of questions – but most sources either give too much detail or too little.)
Ouch! Even so, that’s got to be more benign than tinyurl.com, no? What is its complex script doing?
Once again an internet rule of thumb applies: If you aren’t paying for the service, you aren’t the customer; you’re the product being sold.
All of the url shorteners exist to derive revenue from the information gained when you create the short url or when someone else clicks through it. You’re not going to escape that.
So the only issue remains which specific technology they use to obtain their value without overtly annoying you & your link-clickers too much.
IOW - If your (the OP’s) objection is moral, no url shortener is any better than any other. If your objection is technological, we’d need to know which specific aspects of specific shoertener serves you object to and why. Given your avowed limited understanding of these things, I’m going to suggest any technological objection you have is likely ill-founded unless you’ve got a specific narrow test-case problem you’re needing to resolve.
I suspect he wants to post something on a third party site (e.g. SDMB), and not have search engines harvest where the link is really going. Sure he could robots.txt HIS site. But not the e.g. SDMB.
I suspect that’s a dead idea because Google, et al, already know about the url shortening services and they’ll dereference the shortened links to get to the real destination url while they’re spidering.
Right. It is no longer necessary to shorten links in Twitter. You can put any link in a Twitter post and it will count as 22 characters no matter how long it actually is, and will be redirected via Twitter’s own shortening service, t.co. Some people on Twitter still do not seem to have caught on to this and are still, redundantly, using other shorteners, which will presumably send their link first through the t.co redirecter, then through the bit.ly (or whatever) one, before it reaches its target.
Bit.ly was never “official” or “default”, but it wasoften used by Twitterers back in the day when the length of a URL mattered to character count, but so were lots of other shorteners, many of which gave shorter results than bit.ly. As I already mentioned, I used to use is.gd, which I discovered because an account I followed used it.
Did you read my posts?
– but most sources either give too much detail or too little.)