Many of you are probably familiar with goo[.]gl, Google's URL shortener, which stopped accepting new links in April 2018. Google has now announced that the service will cease to support existing links starting on August 25th, 2025.
This raises the question: Is it possible to archive the goo[.]gl service before it shuts down, and provide a platform where these links can be looked up long after the service ends? I am concerned that many links on the internet, especially in old forums where short links were very popular, will break.
The main challenge lies in the sheer number of possible links. The links follow a format with lengths ranging from 5 to 7 characters, comprising alphabetic symbols and numbers. This results in a potential number of links as follows:
- 62^5=916,132,832
- 62^6=56,800,235,584
- 62^7=3,521,614,606,208
This means there are approximately 3.58 trillion possible URLs, although not all of them were used.
I have crawled around 4,800 of these links, which combined take up 1.7 MB of space, averaging around 350 bytes per suffix and resulting URL. Most of the length 7 suffixes appear to be unused
Is it worth archiving this service and making it available to the public, or would this be a waste of time, resources, and money? If it is worthwhile, I need to start soon, as crawling through all these possible URLs will be a time-consuming task and google will likely not provide a download for archiving purposes.