Google Nabs G.Co URL Shortener For Their Own Links

Well, this is clever. Google has just pulled off what may be the biggest URL acquisition of the year.

URL shortening applications have become a hot commodity, as micro-blogging tools like Twitter only give people a limited amount of characters to get their points across. Even though ICANN announced a few months ago that consumers and businesses would be able to apply for non-traditional URL enders, the short ones are still the best ones. Sure enough, Google has just announced its intentions to buy a three-letter URL: g.co.

It doesn't get much shorter than that, at least with the existing plate of TLDs available. This is obviously far shorter than Google's previous URL shortener: goo.gl. But since g.co may not be super obviously owned by Google, the company's retaining the old one for most URLs and g.co will be reserved for Google-owned pages. According to the company, they will 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.


For shame; we were hoping to get this post shortened with g.co. Maybe next time...