How to shorten long URLs using Google Shortener?

You can easily reduce the size of a very long URL. This is typically useful in twitter where there is a huge restriction of size of posts i.e 140 and if you have around 100 chars long URL your message gets curtailed.

This is how you do it:

1. Sign in to your Google Account.
   
2. Just go http://goo.gl/.
3. Enter the URL which you want to shorten in length and press Shorten.
4. Example short URL for http://latest-tech-tips.blogspot.com/ is http://goo.gl/RRqv
   
5. You will instantly get the shortened version of the URL which can be posted in Twitter.
6. It basically reduces the url size by half.
   

How does Google Shortener work?
Being a software engineer I can imagine two ways in which Google Shortener could work:

Based On Encryption:
In this method http://goo.gl/ would acts like a server which encrypts the URL you submitted and generates a Key. This key becomes your URL. If you notice in the url http://goo.gl/RRqv RRqv is the key. This key is again sent to http://goo.gl/ as a parameter which uses the encryption algorithm and decrypts the key and generates back the actual URL and redirects it to the actual URL.

Based on Indexing:
Well Google introduced the word indexing to this world (literally). In this method http://goo.gl/ would index the URL and randomly generate a key which points to this URL. When The user puts this short URL it is simply searched in the database and the actual link is again redirected. But taking into account billions of web pages this would become tedious as the size of the random key would go on increasing. But you never know what Google might have a smart solution for that too.

More interesting Facts about Google Shortener:

1. If you sign in to Google account you will have a complete history of all the URLs you shortened.
2. This way you don't have to bookmark these short URLs.
   
3. You can shorten a URL without Signing in to Google account.
4. These URLs are public and can be share with anybody publicly.
5. You are not required to SignIn to Google Account to use these short URLs.
   

This URL shortening method (but uses different service called http://t.co/) is also used in twitter share button available in blogger. You can try it by re twitting this post.
Hope you will make good use of this facility from Google. Thanks to my buddy @PiyushBhadola (also following this blog) for sharing this URL http://goo.gl/ with me so that I could share this information with you all. Share this information with the masses guys spread the word.

Also Read: Google Tricks