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URL shortening is a technique on the
World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...
in which a
Uniform Resource Locator A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed as a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifie ...
(URL) may be made substantially shorter and still direct to the required page. This is achieved by using a
redirect Redirect and its variants (e.g., redirection) may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media * ''Redirect'', 2012 Christian metal album and its title track by Your Memorial * ''Redirected'' (film), a 2014 action comedy film Computing * ICMP Re ...
which links to the web page that has a long URL. For example, the URL "" can be shortened to "", and the URL "" can be shortened to "". Often the redirect
domain name A domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control within the Internet. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services and more. As ...
is shorter than the original one. A friendly URL may be desired for messaging technologies that limit the number of
characters Character or Characters may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Literature * ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk * ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...
in a message (for example SMS), for reducing the amount of typing required if the reader is copying a URL from a print source, for making it easier for a person to remember, or for the intention of a
permalink A permalink or permanent link is a URL that is intended to remain unchanged for many years into the future, yielding a hyperlink that is less susceptible to link rot. Permalinks are often rendered simply, that is, as clean URLs, to be easier to ...
. In November 2009, the shortened links of the URL shortening service
Bitly Bitly is a URL shortening service and a link management platform. The company Bitly, Inc. was established in 2008. It is privately held and based in New York City. Bitly shortens 600 million links per month, for use in social networking, SMS, a ...
were accessed 2.1 billion times. Other uses of URL shortening are to "beautify" a link, track clicks, or disguise the underlying address. This is because the URL shortener can redirect to just about any web domain, even malicious ones. So, although disguising of the underlying address may be desired for legitimate business or personal reasons, it is open to abuse. Some URL shortening service providers have found themselves on spam blocklists, because of the use of their redirect services by sites trying to bypass those very same blocklists. Some websites prevent short, redirected URLs from being posted.


Purposes

There are several reasons to use URL shortening. Often regular unshortened links may be aesthetically unpleasing. Many web developers pass descriptive attributes in the URL to represent data hierarchies, command structures, transaction paths or session information. This can result in URLs that are hundreds of characters long and that contain complex character patterns. Such URLs are difficult to memorize, type out or distribute. As a result, long URLs must be copied and pasted for reliability. Thus, short URLs may be more convenient for websites or hard copy publications (e.g. a printed magazine or a book), the latter often requiring that very long strings be broken into multiple lines (as is the case with some
e-mail Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic (digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...
software or
internet forum An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least tempora ...
s) or truncated. On
Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, an ...
and some
instant messaging Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of online chat allowing real-time text transmission over the Internet or another computer network. Messages are typically transmitted between two or more parties, when each user inputs text and trigg ...
services, there is a limit to the number of characters a message can carry however, Twitter now shortens links automatically using its own URL shortening service, , so there is no need to use a separate URL shortening service just to shorten URLs in a tweet. On other such services, using a URL shortener can allow linking to web pages which would otherwise violate this constraint. Some shortening services, such as , , and can generate URLs that are human-readable, although the resulting strings are longer than those generated by a length-optimized service. Finally, URL shortening sites provide detailed information on the clicks a link receives, which can be simpler than setting up an equally powerful server-side analytics engine, and unlike the latter, does not require any access to the server. URLs encoded in two dimensional barcodes such as
QR code A QR code (an initialism for quick response code) is a type of matrix barcode (or two-dimensional barcode) invented in 1994 by the Japanese company Denso Wave. A barcode is a machine-readable optical label that can contain information about th ...
are often shortened by a URL shortener in order to reduce the printed area of the code, or allow printing at lower density in order to improve scanning reliability.


Registering a short URL

Some websites create short links to make sharing links via instant messaging easier, and to make it cheaper to send them via SMS. This can be done online, at the web pages of a URL shortening service; to do it in batch via bulk upload with tools like CSV importer or on demand may require the use of an API. A few well-known websites have set up their own URL shortening services for their own use for example, Twitter with t.co, Google with g.co, and GoDaddy with x.co.


Techniques

In URL shortening, every long URL is associated with a
unique key In relational database management systems, a unique key is a candidate key that is not the primary key of the relation. All the candidate keys of a relation can uniquely identify the records of the relation, but only one of them is used as the prim ...
, which is the part after its top-level domain name. For example, has a key of , these keys are case-sensitive most of the time and entering wrong case may lead to different destination URL. Not all redirection is treated equally; the redirection instruction sent to a browser can contain in its header the
HTTP status This is a list of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) response status codes. Status codes are issued by a server in response to a client's request made to the server. It includes codes from IETF Request for Comments (RFCs), other specifications, ...
301 (Moved Permanently), 302 (Found), 307 (Temporary Redirect) or 308 (Permanent Redirect). There are several techniques to implement a URL shortening. Keys can be generated in base 36, assuming 26 letters and 10 numbers. In this case, each character in the sequence will be . Alternatively, if uppercase and lowercase letters are differentiated, then each character can represent a single digit within a number of base 62 (26 + 26 + 10). In order to form the key, a
hash function A hash function is any function that can be used to map data of arbitrary size to fixed-size values. The values returned by a hash function are called ''hash values'', ''hash codes'', ''digests'', or simply ''hashes''. The values are usually ...
can be made, or a random number generated so that key sequence is not predictable. Or users may propose their own custom keys. For example, can be shortened to . Not all URI schemes are capable of being shortened as of 2011, although URI schemes such as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and are being addressed by such services as URL shorteners. Typically, and URLs are not supported for security reasons (to combat attacks like
cross-site scripting Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a type of security vulnerability that can be found in some web applications. XSS attacks enable attackers to inject client-side scripts into web pages viewed by other users. A cross-site scripting vulnerability ma ...
and
session hijacking In computer science, session hijacking, sometimes also known as cookie hijacking, is the exploitation of a valid computer session—sometimes also called a ''session key''—to gain unauthorized access to information or services in a computer sy ...
). Some URL shortening services support the forwarding of URLs, as an alternative to address munging, to avoid unwanted harvest by
web crawlers A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing (''web spid ...
or
bots The British Overseas Territories (BOTs), also known as the United Kingdom Overseas Territories (UKOTs), are fourteen dependent territory, territories with a constitutional and historical link with the United Kingdom. They are the last remna ...
. This may sometimes be done using short,
CAPTCHA A CAPTCHA ( , a contrived acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart") is a type of challenge–response test used in computing to determine whether the user is human. The term was coined in 2003 ...
-protected URLs, but this is not common. Makers of URL shorteners usually register domain names with less popular or esoteric
Top-level domain A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet after the root domain. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in ...
s in order to achieve a short URL and a catchy name, often using
domain hack A domain hack is a domain name that suggests a word, phrase, or name when concatenating two or more adjacent levels of that domain. For example, and , using the fictitious country-code domains ''.ds'' and ''.le'', suggest the words ''birds'' an ...
s. This results in registration of different URL shorteners with a myriad of different countries, leaving no relation between the country where the domain has been registered and the URL shortener itself or the shortened links.
Top-level domain A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet after the root domain. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in ...
s of countries such as
Libya Libya (; ar, ليبيا, Lībiyā), officially the State of Libya ( ar, دولة ليبيا, Dawlat Lībiyā), is a country in the Maghreb region in North Africa. It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Egypt to the east, Suda ...
(
.ly .ly is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Libya. Registration A .ly registration is the process of registering a user domain name within the ccTLD for Libya. The .ly domain, introduced in 1997,
),
Samoa Samoa, officially the Independent State of Samoa; sm, Sāmoa, and until 1997 known as Western Samoa, is a Polynesian island country consisting of two main islands ( Savai'i and Upolu); two smaller, inhabited islands ( Manono and Apolima); ...
(
.ws .ws is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Samoa. It is administered by SamoaNIC, for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Government of Samoa. The .ws domain is an abbreviation for "Western Samoa", which was the nation' ...
),
Mongolia Mongolia; Mongolian script: , , ; literal translation, lit. "Mongol Nation" or "State of Mongolia" () is a landlocked country in East Asia, bordered by Russia Mongolia–Russia border, to the north and China China–Mongolia border, to the s ...
(
.mn .mn is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Mongolia. It is administered by .MN Registry, Datacom. The domain name is composed of the consonants in the first syllable of the country name. The .MN registry is operated under the ...
),
Malaysia Malaysia ( ; ) is a country in Southeast Asia. The federal constitutional monarchy consists of thirteen states and three federal territories, separated by the South China Sea into two regions: Peninsular Malaysia and Borneo's East Malays ...
(
.my .my is the Internet country code top-level domain ( ccTLD) for Malaysia Malaysia ( ; ) is a country in Southeast Asia Southeast Asia, also spelled South East Asia and South-East Asia, and also known as Southeastern Asia, South-eas ...
) and
Liechtenstein Liechtenstein (), officially the Principality of Liechtenstein (german: link=no, Fürstentum Liechtenstein), is a German-speaking microstate located in the Alps between Austria and Switzerland. Liechtenstein is a semi-constitutional monarchy ...
( .li) have been used as well as many others. In some cases, the political or cultural aspects of the country in charge of the
top-level domain A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet after the root domain. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in ...
may become an issue for users and owners, but this is not usually the case. Services may record inbound statistics, which may be viewed publicly by others.


Expiry and time-limited services

Many providers claim their shortened URLs won’t expire for as long as the service is provided. However, they may decide to discontinue the service at any time. A permanent URL is not necessarily a good thing. There are security implications, and obsolete short URLs remain in existence and may be circulated long after they cease to point to a relevant or even extant destination. Sometimes a short URL is useful simply to give someone over a telephone conversation for a one-off access or file download, and no longer needed within a couple of minutes. Some providers offer expiration on shortened URLs. This may include URLs that expire after a certain amount of time, on a certain date or after a certain number of usages. A Microsoft Security Brief recommends the creation of short-lived URLs, but for reasons explicitly of security rather than convenience.


History

An early reference is US Paten
6957224
which describes
...a system, method and computer program product for providing links to remotely located information in a network of remotely connected computers. A uniform resource locator (URL) is registered with a server. A shorthand link is associated with the registered URL. The associated shorthand link and URL are logged in a registry database. When a request is received for a shorthand link, the registry database is searched for an associated URL. If the shorthand link is found to be associated with a URL, the URL is fetched, otherwise an error message is returned.
The patent was filed in September 2000; while the patent was issued in 2005, US patent applications are made public within 18 months of filing. Another reference to URL shortening was in 2001. The first notable URL shortening service,
TinyURL TinyURL is a URL shortening web service, which provides short aliases for redirection of long URLs. Kevin Gilbertson, a web developer, launched the service in January 2002 as a way to post links in newsgroup postings which frequently had long, ...
, was launched in 2002. Its popularity influenced the creation of at least 100 similar websites, although most are simply domain alternatives. Initially,
Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, an ...
automatically translated URLs longer than twenty-six characters using TinyURL, although it began using bit.ly instead in 2009Wortham, Jenna (7 May 2009
"Bit.ly Eclipses TinyURL on Twitter"
''Bits'' ( blog at ''
The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
''). Retrieved 1 January 2011.
and later developed its own URL shortening service, t.co. On 14 August 2009
WordPress WordPress (WP or WordPress.org) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in hypertext preprocessor language and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported HTTPS. Features include a plugin architecture a ...
announced the ''wp.me'' URL shortener for use when referring to any WordPress.com blog post. In November 2009, shortened links on '' bit.ly'' were accessed 2.1 billion times.Ahmed, Murad (7 December 2009)
"New Project in Scramble To Save Vanishing Internet Links – The Internet Archive Is Fighting To Preserve Shortened Web Links Created by Free Online Services That May Be Running Out of Money"
. ''
The Times ''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper ''The Sunday Times'' (fo ...
''. Retrieved 1 January 2011.
Around that time, ''bit.ly'' and ''TinyURL'' were the most widely used URL-shortening services. One service, tr.im, stopped generating short URLs in 2009, blaming a lack of revenue-generating mechanisms to cover costs and Twitter's default use of the ''bit.ly'' shortener, and questioning whether other shortening services could be profitable from URL shortening in the longer term. It resumed for a time, then closed. The shortest possible long-term URLs were generated by NanoURL from December 2009 until about 2011, associated with the top-level ''.to'' (Tonga) domain, in the form , where represents a sequence of random numbers and letters. On 14 December 2009
Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. I ...
announced a service called Google URL Shortener at goo.gl, which originally was only available for use through Google products (such as Google Toolbar and
FeedBurner FeedBurner is a web feed management service primarily for monetizing RSS feeds, primarily by inserting targeted advertisements into them. It was founded in 2004 and acquired by Google in 2007. Services Services provided to publishers include traf ...
) and extensions for
Google Chrome Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS, ...
. On 21 December 2009, Google introduced a
YouTube YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second most vis ...
URL Shortener, youtu.be. From September 2010 Google URL Shortener became available via a direct interface. The goo.gl service provides analytics details and a QR code generator. On 30 March 2018
Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. I ...
announced that it is "turning down support for goo.gl over the coming weeks and replacing it with Firebase Dynamic Links" (although existing goo.gl links will continue to function).


Advantages

The main advantage of a short link is its brevity. Depending on the transcription used, it might be more easily communicated and entered without error. To some extent it can obscure the destination of the URL; this may be advantageous, disadvantageous, or irrelevant.


Shortcomings

Short URLs often circumvent the intended use of
top-level domain A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet after the root domain. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in ...
s for indicating the country of origin; domain registration in many countries requires proof of physical presence within that country, although a redirected URL has no such guarantee.


Abuse

URL shortening may be utilized by
spammers This is a list of individuals and organizations noteworthy for engaging in bulk electronic spamming, either on their own behalf or on behalf of others. It is not a list of all spammers, only those whose actions have attracted substantial independe ...
or for illicit internet activities. As a result, many have been removed from online registries or shut down by web hosts or internet service providers. According to Tonic Corporation, the registry for .to domains, it is "very serious about keeping domains spam free" and may remove URL shortening services from their registry if the service is abused. In addition, "u.nu" made the following announcement upon closing operations:
The last straw came on September 3, 2010, when the server was disconnected without notice by our hosting provider in response to reports of a number of links to child pornography sites. The disconnection of the server caused us serious problems, and to be honest, the level and nature of the abuse has become quite demoralizing. Given the choice between spending time and money to find a different home, or just giving up, the latter won out.
Google's url-shortener discussion group has frequently included messages from frustrated users reporting that specific shortened URLs have been disabled after they were reported as spam. A study in May 2012 showed that 61% of URL shorteners had shut down (614 of 1002). The most common cause cited was abuse by spammers.


Linkrot

The convenience offered by URL shortening also introduces potential problems, which have led to criticism of the use of these services. Short URLs, for example, will be subject to
linkrot Link rot (also called link death, link breaking, or reference rot) is the phenomenon of hyperlinks tending over time to cease to point to their originally targeted file, web page, or server due to that resource being relocated to a new address ...
if the shortening service stops working; all URLs related to the service will become broken. It is a legitimate concern that many existing URL shortening services may not have a sustainable business model in the long term. In late 2009, the
Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...
started the "301 Works" projects, together with twenty collaborating companies (initially), whose short URLs will be preserved by the project.


Transnational law

Shortened internet links typically use ccTLD domains, and are therefore often under the jurisdiction of a nation other than where the service provider is located.
Libya Libya (; ar, ليبيا, Lībiyā), officially the State of Libya ( ar, دولة ليبيا, Dawlat Lībiyā), is a country in the Maghreb region in North Africa. It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Egypt to the east, Suda ...
, for instance, exercised its control over the .ly domain in October 2010 to shut down vb.ly for violating Libyan pornography laws. Failure to predict such problems with URL shorteners and investment in URL shortening companies may reflect a lack of
due diligence Due diligence is the investigation or exercise of care that a reasonable business or person is normally expected to take before entering into an agreement or contract with another party or an act with a certain standard of care. It can be a l ...
.


Blocking and banning

Some websites prevent short, redirected URLs from being posted. In April 2009, TinyURL was reported to be blocked in
Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia, officially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), is a country in Western Asia. It covers the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula, and has a land area of about , making it the List of Asian countries by area, fifth-largest country in Asia ...
.
Yahoo! Answers Yahoo! Answers was a community-driven question-and-answer (Q&A) website or knowledge market owned by Yahoo! where users would ask questions and answer those submitted by others, and upvote them to increase their visibility. Questions were org ...
blocks postings that contain TinyURLs, and
Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read referenc ...
does not accept links by any URL shortening services in its articles. The
Reddit Reddit (; stylized in all lowercase as reddit) is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") submit content to the site such as links, text posts, image ...
community strongly discourages and in some subreddits, outright bans URL shortening services for link submissions, because they disguise the origin domain name and whether the link has previously been submitted to Reddit, and there are few or no legitimate reasons to use link shorteners for Reddit link submissions.


Privacy and security

A short URL obscures the target address and can be used to redirect to an unexpected site. Examples of this are "
rickrolling Rickrolling or a Rickroll is an internet meme involving the unexpected appearance of the music video for the 1987 song " Never Gonna Give You Up", performed by the English singer Rick Astley. The video has over 1 billion views on YouTube. The ...
", and redirecting to
shock site A shock site is a website that is intended to be offensive or disturbing to its viewers, though it can also contain elements of humor or evoke (in some viewers) sexual arousal. Shock-oriented websites generally contain material such as pornograp ...
s, or to affiliate websites. The short URL can allow blocked URLs to be accessed, bypassing site blocklists; this facilitates redirection of a user to blocked scam pages or pages containing malware or XSS attacks. TinyURL tries to disable spam-related links from redirecting. ZoneAlarm, however, has warned its users: "TinyURL may be unsafe. This website has been known to distribute spyware." TinyURL countered this problem by offering an option to view a link's destination before using a shortened URL. This ability is installed on the browser via the TinyURL website and requires the use of cookies. A destination preview may also be obtained by prefixing the word "preview" to the TinyURL URL; for example, the destination of is revealed by entering . Other URL shortening services provide a similar destination display. Security professionals suggest that users check a short URL's destination before accessing it, following an instance where the shortening service cli.gs was compromised, exposing millions of users to security uncertainties. There are several web applications that can display the destination URL of a shortened URL. Some URL shortening services filter their links through bad-site screening services such as
Google Safe Browsing Google Safe Browsing is a service from Google that warns users when they attempt to navigate to a dangerous website or download dangerous files. Safe Browsing also notifies webmasters when their websites are compromised by malicious actors and h ...
. Many sites that accept user-submitted content block links, however, to certain domains in order to cut down on spam, and for this reason, known URL redirection services are often themselves added to spam blocklists. Another privacy problem is that many services' shortened URL format is small enough that it is vulnerable to brute-force search. Many people use URL shorteners when they share links to private content, and in fact many web services like Google Maps have offered automatic generation of shortened links for driving directions that reveal personal information like home addresses and sensitive destinations like "clinics for specific diseases (including cancer and mental diseases), addiction treatment centers, abortion providers, correctional and juvenile detention facilities, payday and car-title lenders, gentlemen’s clubs, etc."


Additional layer of complexity

Short URLs, although making it easier to access what might otherwise be a very long URL or user-space on an ISP server, add an additional layer of complexity to the process of retrieving web pages. Every access requires more requests (at least one more DNS lookup, though it may be cached, and one more HTTP/HTTPS request), thereby increasing latency, the time taken to access the page, and also the risk of failure, since the shortening service may become unavailable. Another operational limitation of URL shortening services is that browsers do not resend POST bodies when a redirect is encountered. This can be overcome by making the service a
reverse proxy In computer networks, a reverse proxy is the application that sits in front of back-end applications and forwards client (e.g. browser) requests to those applications. Reverse proxies help increase scalability, performance, resilience and securi ...
, or by elaborate schemes involving cookies and buffered POST bodies, but such techniques present security and scaling challenges, and are therefore not used on
extranets An extranet is a controlled private network that allows access to partners, vendors and suppliers or an authorized set of customers – normally to a subset of the information accessible from an organization's intranet. An extranet is similar to a ...
or Internet-scale services.


Notable services

Open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
and commercial scripts are also available for redirecting and shortening links, usually written in
PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group. ...
as a
web application A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection. History In earlier computing models like client-serv ...
or a plugin for one of the popular applications such as
WordPress WordPress (WP or WordPress.org) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in hypertext preprocessor language and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported HTTPS. Features include a plugin architecture a ...
. Such scripts avoid many issues with shortening services, keep the domain name as part of the shortened link, and can be made private.


See also

* Country code top-level domain *
Domain Name System The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed naming system for computers, services, and other resources in the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information with domain names assigned to ...
*
Emoji domain An emoji domain is a domain name with one or more emoji in it, for example 😉.. Function With the exception of the information emoji (), the trademark emoji () and the "m" emoji (), for an emoji to work as a domain name, it must be convert ...
*
Generic top-level domain Generic top-level domains (gTLDs) are one of the categories of top-level domains (TLDs) maintained by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) for use in the Domain Name System of the Internet. A top-level domain is the last level of eve ...
*
Link rot Link rot (also called link death, link breaking, or reference rot) is the phenomenon of hyperlinks tending over time to cease to point to their originally targeted file, web page, or server due to that resource being relocated to a new address o ...
*
List of Internet top-level domains This list of Internet top-level domains (TLD) contains top-level domains, which are those domains in the DNS root zone of the Domain Name System of the Internet. A list of the top-level domains by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) ...
*
Semantic URL Clean URLs, also sometimes referred to as RESTful URLs, user-friendly URLs, pretty URLs or search engine-friendly URLs, are URLs intended to improve the usability and accessibility of a website or web service by being immediately and intuitively m ...
* *
Vanity domain In the Domain Name System (DNS), a vanity domain is a domain name whose purpose is to express the individuality of the person on whose behalf it is registered. This contrasts with domain names which resolve to an organisation (e.g. a company) or ...


References


External links

*
Comparison of URL Shortening Services
SearchEngineLand. April 2009. {{DEFAULTSORT:Url Shortening URL Internet terminology URL-shortening services