this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2024
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A lot.
Goo.gl has a namespace for 10 billion entries, it used to keep tracking/analytics data for each link, with a user interface, and it would happily generate them for links to internal stuff.
Just keeping it running would take some containers of server racks, plus updating the security, accounting for changing web standards, and so on.
Keep in mind this isn't some self-hosted url shortener with less than a million entries and a peak of 10K users/second, that you can slap onto a random server and keep it going. It's a multiple orders of magnitude larger beast, requiring a multi-server architecture just to keep the database, plus more of the same for the analytics, admin interface... and users will expect it to return a result in a fraction of a second, worldwide.
They could drop all the tracking though and only serve the public redirects. A much simpler product that would retain web links.
I think they've dropped the tracking already. Still, where's the money in that?
They also can't release the database, not without prior consent of the link creators, or risking exposing some login credentials some very smart people might've put in there.
Why does there have to be money in it when they're sunsetting the service?
Google/Alphabet is a for-profit corporation, it makes no sense for them to do anything without some sort of profit.
Good analysis, I agree and understand.