Web links and websites disappear all the time. But Google’s planned erasure of millions of links at once demonstrates the risks of putting our personal and collective digital histories in Big Tech’s hands.

Google, Apple, Meta and other giants may hold years of photos, emails and posts that mark your milestones and mundanities, and they’re de facto archives of the internet age. That makes your memories and our digital history subject to their whims.

Why short links were such a big deal

In the 2000s, link shorteners like TinyURL and Bitly became internet stars by letting you transform a long web address like this … https://www.washingtonpost.com/newsletters/the-tech-friend/

… into a truncated link like: wapo.st/thetechfriend

If you wanted to share a link online or in a printed book, the short versions were easier to read and took up fewer letters in the space constraints that used to exist on sites like Twitter. Short links could also be used to track all clicks to your webpage or sometimes to disguise malicious websites.

Google started its own link shortener in 2009 and it spread like wildfire. The short links created looked like this: goo.gl/Pp01oy

Poking around, I found Google short links that took me to a 2014 article about a soccer player dressed as Santa, a World Bank Group education report and a coffee break receipt for Mexico’s national electric company. Many Google short links took me to webpages that don’t exist any more.

(You can explore Google short links in the Internet Archive, a nonprofit library archive for the web.)

Starting in 2018, Google stopped letting people create new goo.gl links but said then that existing ones would be fine. But last year the company decided to switch off the Google short links already online.

In its post Friday, the company said that it would spare what’s likely to be a fraction of those short links that were getting clicks as of late last year. Original webpages like the soccer Santa article will be unaffected but most Google links across the web that directed you to webpages like that will stop working.

Links that die aren’t necessarily just inconvenient. They can also erode your access to information. The Harvard Law Review a decade ago found that half of the links included in Supreme Court opinions since 1996 no longer worked as originally intended.

Jack Cushman, director of the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School, lamented the loss of the Google links. He said links that refer you to other links are the connective tissue for the internet. “There’s no doubt this is a real loss for the web,” Cushman said.

Racing to archive what could be lost

Michael L. Nelson, a digital archivist and computer science professor at Old Dominion University, acknowledged Google’s explanation that many of the links the company is wiping out are little used.

But he and other internet preservationists say that digital ephemera can have useful nuggets of information – and it’s hard to know what you’d miss when it’s gone. You might rarely or never look at a silly old family photo or a 1960s magazine advertisement but it still has value as a glimpse of your life or American history.

If you want to archive your own webpages or web creations, Cushman recommended the internet Archive’s “Save Page Now” feature and WebRecorder. For academic journal writers, courts and news organisations, the Library Innovation Lab’s Perma.cc service commits to saving a permanent record of web content. (There’s a Perma link to the Google founders’ academic paper describing their search engine.)

Digital preservationists and internet nerds, including the internet Archive and ArchiveTeam, have been racing to catalogue the goo.gl links before the company nukes them.

Nelson said that he “hated” Google’s decision to delete many of its short links. He has joked with friends that “at best this saves Google dozens of dollars”.

For context, the company pulls in roughly US$245,000 ($418,000) every minute.