Where were you when goo.gl shutdown?

11 August 2025 "… all of this ended up in storage rooms, and everything became rotten and full of holes, and he himself finally turned into some kind of hole in humanity." ✪ ✪“…все это сваливалось в кладовые, и все становилось гниль и прореха, и сам он обратился наконец в какую-то прореху на человечестве.” — Google Gogol, Dead Souls Vol. 1, Chp. 6 In December 2009, Google launched a URL shortening service alongside an update to their toolbar and FeedBurner. TechCrunch heralded the new service as the “Stablest, Most Secure, And Fastest URL Shortener On The Web” in an article released at the time. Those words — stable, secure, fast — weren’t chosen by an overexcited editor either, they appear on the goo.gl website on day one. Smash cut to July 2024, when Google announces in a blog post announces that their super stable and secure URL shortener is getting nuked from orbit in just over a year. *Curb theme plays* Now, I know I’m framing this as a completely unforseen outcome, a surprise betrayal, but the truth is that folks knew this would happen from the get-go. Scott Gilbertson wrote this in an article for Webmonkey/Wired covering the services introduction in 2009: Of course the bigger problems with URL shorteners — link-rot, spam and redirect mishaps to name a few — are still problems regardless of whether the shortener is controlled by Google or anyone else. And for anyone who thinks that Google services have a better chance of being around far into the future, may we remind you that Google Notebook, Google Answers and several other services have disappeared over the years. Prescient, right? The fact is that URL shorteners which don’t share their database (read: all URL shortners if you round up) are a terrible, no good, very bad idea. Link rot makes us amnesiacs, and if our history is our future, it’s looking very hazy. The Resistance Time and time again, moments before the ossified arches of a website are set to crumble due to active neglect by the arsonists on payroll in Mergers & Acquisitions, a certain brigade of ragtag vigilantes always rush in to save the furniture and family photos. I’m of course talking about the famed Archive Team. The Archive Team are the same folks that saved Geocities from Yahoo!, Yahoo! Answers from Yahoo!, and Yahoo! Groups from… uh… well, you know. Now, I know what you’re thinking now: “wow, these Archive Team people are the coolest ever, I bet they have clear skin and healthy hair”. Well, what if I could tell you that anyone who can operate a terminal can join the war effort in as little as two commands. Despair not if you don’t meet that description but desire to join the club, it’s also pretty easy to do by pointing and clicking. Enlisting in the Fight Against Link Rot To join in the effort to help stem the damage goo.gl’s shutdown will cause, the Archive Team is trying to map all the short URLs (e.g., http://goo.gl/gEdpoS ) to their long URLs (e.g., https://www.clubic.com/int... ). How do we do that? Well it’s very simple, and very stupid: Visit a goo.gl short link. Observe what URL it redirects to, if any. Do this again for every possible short link. As best as I can tell from the Archive Team tracker, it looks like there are about 3 billion links that need visiting. That’s just too many for one person to do. At the time of writing, there’s less than two weeks left to archive all these links. Luckily, the Archive Team have put together a handy programme that automates this. It’s so easy to use that >3,000 ✪ ✪A quick estimate from quickly grep’ing the leaderboard so don’t hold me to that number. other folks have used it to save goo.gl short links. As I alluded to, there are two ways to run this programme (known as the Archive Team Warrior). It’s super easy and anyone can do it. Just don’t use a VPN or run this over an ISP that will block or alter websites. More info here about that. Using the Command Line and Docker Quoting from the sacred texts Archive Team wiki, you need simply: Download and install Docker Open your terminal on Mac and Linux, or your Command Prompt on Windows. Copy/paste the first encantation docker run --detach --name watchtower --restart = on-failure --volume /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock containrrr/watchtower --label-enable --include-restarting --cleanup --interval 3600 Copy/paste the second encantation docker run --detach --name archiveteam-warrior --label = com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.enable = true --log-driver json-file --log-opt max-size = 50m --restart = on-failure --publish 8001:8001 atdr.meo.ws/archiveteam/warrior-dockerfile Visit http://localhost:8001 And that’s it! Follow the on-screen instructions and make sure you click on the Goo.gl project (selecting “ArchiveTeam’s Choice” will do it). You can run this on your desktop or laptop, or even better yet, set-it-and-forget-it on a VPS or server somewhere in cloud land. If you can’t/won’t use Docker, here are instructions for how to do this with Podman and Orbstack. Pointing and Clicking with VirtualBox Install VirtualBox Grab the Warrior Virtual Machine In VirtualBox, click File > Import Appliance… and open the file. Start the virtual machine. Outside of the virtual machine (i.e., on your host), visit http://localhost:8001 “I’m Doing My Part!” I started running the Warrior on the 9th of August and, according to the leaderboard, I’ve uploaded more than 370,000 URLs, or about 14Gb worth at the time of writing ✪ ✪If you’re thinking the data size and the number of URLs is disproportionate, I’m right with you. I’m not sure what the deal is, but I know I’m misunderstanding something about the leaderboard. other folks have used it to save goo.gl short links. We have less than two weeks to go, with 3.3 billion URLs links unshortened and just under half a billion left to go as of the night of the 11th of August. Download the video: AV1 WEBM MP4 I could watch this run all day.