Google buys g.co as official company URL shortener

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Google products will soon also be available at g.co URLs.

The search giant announced in a blog post that it has bought the .co web address to be used as its official company URL shortener.

‘In the world of URLs, bigger is not always better,’ Gary Briggs, Google’s vice president of consumer marketing, said in the Monday post. ‘In 2009, we helped shrink up long, unwieldy URLs by launching our public URL shortener, goo.gl. Today, we’re announcing a new URL shortcut that will only link to official Google products and services: g.co.’

But although Google is heading to g.co, that doesn’t mean that goo.gl is getting axed. Quite the opposite, Briggs said.

‘There’s no need to fret about the fate of goo.gl,’ he said. ‘It will continue to be our public URL shortener that anybody can use to shorten URLs across the web.’

But, g.co provides Google itself with an even shorter URL that is easier to remember, Briggs said.

With URL shorteners in general, ‘the downside is, you often can’t tell what website you’re going to be redirected to,’ he said. ‘We’ll only use g.co to send you to webpages that are owned by Google, and only we can create g.co shortcuts. That means you can visit a g.co shortcut confident you will always end up at a page for a Google product or service.’

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles
Twitter.com/nateog