Quis breviaret ipsos breviares – who shortens the URL shorteners?
March 27, 2009
One Comment
Inspired by a comment from Christian Schenk (@christianschenk), I've tested which URL shorteners make themselves longer when self-applied (if they're in my URL shorteners review but not listed here, then they won't generate a URL for themselves). Just for something to do.
| URL Shortener |
URL length | 'Short' URL length | Increase | % increase |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ow.ly | 12 | 17 | 5 | 41.7 |
| Bit.ly | 13 | 18 | 5 | 38.5 |
| Short.to | 15 | 20 | 5 | 33.3 |
| Snurl.com | 16 | 22 | 6 | 37.5 |
| Twurl.nl | 15 | 22 | 7 | 46.7 |
| Tinyurl.com | 18 | 25 | 7 | 55.6 |
Headings explained
- URL length Length of original URL (including http://)
- Short URL Length of the shortened URL each service generates for itself
- Increase How many characters bigger this is
- % increase What the % increase is
It's amazing that some services haven't got more sophistication here. You could expand the table above with a column for "accepts invalid URL" - and you could write a "yes" in all six rows! Try shortening "foobar" and it'll work; IMO this should throw an error.
Anyway, as always nice research and a good read.