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i read in an earlier thread for this on HN - "this is a classic example of data driven product decision" aka we can reduce costs by $x if we just stopped goo.gl

• Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  If companies can spend billions on AI and not have anything in return and be okay with that in the ways of giving free stuff (okay, I'll admit not completely free since you are the product but still free) Then they should also be okay for keeping the goo.gl links honestly. Sounds kinda bad for some good will but this is literally google, the one thing google is notorious for is killing their products.
  • citizenpaul 1y ago
    This is basically modern SV business. This old data is costing us about a million a year to hold onto. KILL IT NOW WITH FIRE. Hey lets also dump 100 Billion dollars into this AI thing without any business plan or ideas to back it up this year. HOW FAST CAN YOU ACCEPT MY CHECK!
    • jiggawatts 1y ago
      Nobody wants to catch a falling knife, everybody wants to attach a lanyard to the moon rocket.
• Aurornis 1y ago
  The Google URL shortener stopped accepting new links around 2018. It has been deprecated for a long time. I doubt it was a cost-driven decision on the basis of running the servers. My guess would be that it was a security and maintenance burden that nobody wanted. They also might have wanted to use the domain for something else.
  • resize2996 1y ago
    "security and maintenance burden" == "cost" == "cost-driven decision"
    • aspenmayer 1y ago
      Capital inputs are one part of the equation. The human cost of mental and contextual overhead cannot be reduced to dollars and cents.
      • mixdup 1y ago
        Sure it can. It takes X people Y hours a day/month/week to perform tasks, including planning and digging up the context behind, related to this service. Those X people make Z dollars per year. It's an extremely simple math equation
        • aspenmayer 1y ago
          Emotional labor doesn’t show up on a balance sheet.
  • cogman10 1y ago
    How much of a burden could this really be? The nature of something like this is that the cost to run it naturally goes down over time. Old links get clicked less so the hardware costs would be basically nothing. As for the actual software security, it's a URL shortener. They could rewrite the entire thing in almost no time with just a single dev. Especially since it's strictly hosting static links at this point. It probably took them more time and money to find inactive links than it'd take to keep the entire thing running for a couple of years.
    • londons_explore 1y ago
      I think the concern is someone might scan all the inactive links and find that some of them link to secret URL's, leak design details about how things are built, link to documents shared 'anyone with the link' permission, etc.
• no_wizard 1y ago
  Arguably, this is them collecting the wrong types of data to inform decisions, if that isn't represented in the data.
• thevillagechief 1y ago
  One of the complaints about Google is that it's difficult to launch products due to bureaucracy. I'm starting to thing that's not a bad thing. If they'd done a careful analysis of the cost of jumping into this url-shortener bandwagon, we wouldn't be here. Maybe it's not a bad thing they move slower now.
  • margalabargala 1y ago
    I would bet that the salaries paid to the product managers behind shutting this down, during the time they worked on shutting it down, outweigh the annual cost of running the service by an order of magnitude.
• jerlam 1y ago
  Goo.gl didn't have customers, it had users. Customers pay, either with money or their personal data, now or the future. Goo.gl did not make any money or have a plan to do so in the future.
  • CydeWeys 1y ago
    One wonders why they don't, instead of showing down, display a 15s interstitial unskippable YouTube-style ad prior to redirecting. That way they'll make money, and they can fund the service not having to shut down, and there isn't any linkrot.
    • gloxkiqcza 1y ago
      This is such an evil idea.
      • xp84 1y ago
        Why is it evil? If we assume that a free URL shortener is a good thing, and that shutting one down is a bad thing, and given that every link shortener will have costs (not just the servers -- constant moderation needs, as scammers and worse use them) and no revenue. The only possible outcome is for them all to eventually shut down, causing unrecoverable linkrot. Given those options, an ad seems like a trivial annoyance to anyone who very much needs a very old link to work. Anyone who still has the ability to update their pages can always update their links.
      • sincerely 1y ago
        This is how every URL shortener on the internet worked used to work
      • CydeWeys 1y ago
        Well, it's either that or a paywall. Pick your poison.
  • franga2000 1y ago
    The monetary value of the goodwill and mindshare generated by such a free service is hard to calculate, but definitely significant. I wouldn't be surprised if it was more than it costs to run.
• j45 1y ago
  All while data and visibility is part of the business. Like other things spun down there must not be value in the links.
• manquer 1y ago
  Hard to imagine costs were ever a factor. For company running GCP and giving things like Colab TPUs free the costs of running a URL service would be trivial rounding number at best
  • b112 1y ago
    Outside of bandwidth, I could run this entire service on a raspberry pi. No, I'm not exaggerating. It's just a text end of url to full url lookup. I've handled far more traffic on single machines 20 years ago.
• observationist 1y ago
  At this point, anyone depending on Google for anything deserves to get burned. I don't know how much more clearly they could tell their users that Google has absolutely no respect for users without drone shipping boxes of excrement.
• miohtama 1y ago
  For all HN commenters: if you are not paying for it, you are not a customer and thus you should not complain.