Google Introduces Goo.gl: Is it Worth Using?

Recently Google made their new URL shortener, Goo.gl, freely available to the world, as discussed by Matt Cutts in a recent blog post.

With the enormous range of URL shorteners available today, this doesn’t really sound all that exciting, and maybe some of you are wondering why you should bother checking the service out. Well, we wondered too and that’s the subject of today’s post.

As far as the basics go, Goo.gl works much like any other URL shortener except that you don’t have to set up a new account (unless you’re one of the few who doesn’t already have their own Google Account). If you do have an account, then you just sign in at  http://goo.gl/ and from there it functions the same as other URL shorteners and takes the long URL you enter, like the one for this post:

http://www.marqui.com/blog/google-introduces-googl-is-it-worth-using.aspx

And then shortens it into something like this:

http://goo.gl/9aCA

It has analytics similar to many other URL shorteners and allows you to look at:

• Clicks by country, platform and browser
• Referring sites
• Comprehensive click history over time

After trying Goo.gl out, it doesn’t seem to perform or offer any significant benefits over the other big shorteners (Bit.ly, TinyURL, is.gd etc) and the only downfall is that it doesn’t allow you to create custom shortened URLs that services like Bit.ly do allow. 

Bonus: 

For those of you who aren’t too familiar with the ins and outs of URL shorteners we’ve compiled a short list of our top advantages and disadvantages of using them below. Enjoy! 

Advantages

• Shorten links so they are more manageable
• They allow you to track click data 
• Often the best option for use in popular social media services like Twitter 
• They are easy to share

Disadvantages

• They hide the original URL making them a popular tool for spammers
• They don’t give any information about the link, they are meaningless
• If the URL shortener service you’ve been using goes under, you lose your link. Choose carefully! 
• Depending on the tool you use (like Goo.gl) you may not be able to create URLs with keywords

Posted by Amberlie Denny at October 5, 2010 8:30 AM

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