g.co, the official URL shortcut for Google websites

In the world of URLs, bigger is not always better. In 2009, we helped shrink up long, unwieldy URLs by launching our public URL shortener, goo.gl. Today, we’re announcing a new URL shortcut that will link only to official Google products and services: g.co.

The shorter a URL, the easier it is to share and remember. The downside is, you often can’t tell what website you’re going to be redirected to. We’ll use g.co to send you only 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.

There’s no need to fret about the fate of goo.gl; we like it as much as you do, and nothing is changing on that front. It will continue to be our public URL shortener that anybody can use to shorten URLs across the web.

We’d like to thank our friends at .CO Internet SAS who operate .co domain names for facilitating the acquisition of g.co, and keep your eyes open as we start rolling out g.co as our official URL shortcut for Google websites.

Posted by Gary Briggs, VP Consumer Marketing