Software ideas based on Google shutting down their URL shortener.

Three days ago, Google has announced that Google URL Shortener links will no longer be available. Here's the official statement:

Starting August 23, 2024, goo.gl links will start displaying an interstitial page for a percentage of existing links notifying your users that the link will no longer be supported after August 25th, 2025 prior to navigating to the original target page.

There are over 12 million search results when you search for "goo.gl" (we used Bing as our source here since Google starting hiding the number of search results):

The opportunity

When a big corporation shuts down a service, there's a gap to build many product ideas that replace that service.

In this case, there are many websites that already have goo.gl links placed on a live page. So creating an alternative URL shortener to provide them a replacement to their about-to-be-broken links can be a good idea.

To find websites that use goo.gl links, you could start with a source code search engine like PublicWWW. Type "goo.gl" in the search box and you'll get close to a million results, along with the specific websites that list "goo.gl" in their HTML source code:

These are all highly popular websites with a goo.gl link on their home page.

Note: You should include goo.gl links that are used by Google across its products.

For example, if you go to Google Maps, click on a location and then click 'Share', you'll get this:

Apparently Google will continue to use goo.gl links for their own products. They'll just close the service for the public.

How to recognize these "internal" goo.gl links: They're usually with a subdomain or a start with a sub-page (example: maps.goo.gl, goo.gl/maps, etc.)

Create your own scraper/crawler

Another option is to create your own crawler and discover websites that use Google's URL shortener:

• Use Majestic Million to get a list of some of the world's most popular domains

• Crawl through/scan their home page, their most popular pages, etc. Alternatively, use the "site:" operator (use a search engine API or Google directly). Example:

"goo.gl" -maps site:tiktok.com

Other things you could build/market as a result of this change

• A link monitoring/management tool. When pitching, say that things like these are happening all the time and that your link monitoring tool will make sure that nobody is affected

• SEO service that focuses on internal link structure. You could start pitching by saying that you've discovered links that are about to become broken links

• Migration tool: Automatically transfer their existing goo.gl link to a new URL shortening service