Google URL Shortener

Google last night has opened its direct URL shortening service for the public absolutely free(as always) through http://goo.gl/ .However the service was introduced back in December last year when Google announced that it was something that they have specially thought of for the users exploring the Google Toolbars and its Feedburner service.Now it’s being offered to anyone much more easily through a dedicated web site.

Comparing it with market leader in URL shortening Bit.ly,I preferably take side of Bit.ly as it offers Customized URL shortening which Google not offered in current service release.I put my point in detail below.

Lets workout shortening a URL with both Goo.gl and Bit.ly first.example our blog : http://xpresstechnology.blogspot.com/

Google Dashboard show

And with Bit.ly it show as

In both cases, I have a record of what I’ve shortened. That requires having a Bit.ly account at Bit.ly. With Google, it requires signing in using your Google account. If you don’t sign-in, you can still shorten URLs, but Google won’t keep track of what you’ve shortened and provide easy access to statistics.

Here one can also see the number of clicks generated from the URL you’ve put out and over various time ranges, from two hours, through the past day, week, month and all time.

Bit.ly provides the same type of stats. I like that Google presents them in an at-a-glance view versus Bit.ly.

A great thing that both Google and Bit.ly do is allow you to shorten a URL and track the clicks you generate, using your unique short URL, versus the total number of clicks to the long “destination” URL that have gone through each system.

Considering this. Here’s the URL of Google’s blog post today on the new shortening service:

http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-url-shortener-gets-website.html

When I shortened that URL, this is the short URL I was given:
 http://goo.gl/BZWI

But Google also tweeted the blog post, with this URL:

http://goo.gl/k4Gj

 That’s at least two short URLs leading back to the same page.

What’s missing? The ability to create custom short URLs. Google offers nothing like this, while Bit.ly offers three different options.This is what I talked about in beginning about advantage of bit.ly on goo.gl.

The first method, which is free, allows anyone to add a custom ending to the bit.ly domain.Now what I did by using “Customize, I was able to select a custom ending as shown:hrsht (A short form of my name Harshit) and it accepted.Wow!! that something which can be of big purpose.Google lacked here!! 

http://bit.ly/hrsht

The custom domain service above called Bit.ly Pro offered free. There’s also third version called   Bit.ly enterprise which is a premium service offered by Bit.ly which meant that if you have a custom domain and  if anyone else tries to shorten your URL using Bit.ly, they’ll be given a shortened URL using your domain.