Google announced today that it has acquired the domain “g.co” and will be using it exclusively for shortened URLs for the company’s services. Google hopes to make their URLs easier to pass around via social networks and make it easier for all to remember.
“The shorter a URL, the easier it is to share and remember. The downside is, you often can’t tell what website you’re going to be redirected to. 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,” Google stated in an official blog post.
Google also indicated that this new service will not affect Google’s current URL shortening service, Goo.gl. “There’s no need to fret about the fate of goo.gl; we like it as much as you do, and nothing is changing on that front. It will continue to be our public URL shortener that anybody can use to shorten URLs across the web.”
Google has been on a roll recently by introducing a new attempt at social networking and a new attempt to compete with Facebook. The new service, called Google+, looks similar to Facebook and has features such as photos, messages, comments, and other content from a select group of friends.
It would be interesting to see if goo.gl will catch on and possibly replace its current service, goo.gl, and eventually give users an alternative to bit.ly. Bit.ly is currently used on social networking sites such as Twitter as a popular means to shorten shared URLs.
