We all know that URL shortening services are a great aid when you want to shorten a URL. What I did not realize is that they can fill up one of the many gaps when performing a search for something(someone) on the internet. Usually you exhaust all the usual places like web, ftp,usenet, torrent, twitter,ftp search engines. But there is a whole(maybe not that big) world out there of short URL messaging. A good example is bit.ly this URL shortening service even has statistics about short URLs and every time you shorten a URL it is shortened to the same short URL(based on parameters, maybe time, unknown to me at this moment), now that does make things easier when using them to track something(someone) down. For example:
http://www.google.com = http://bit.ly/14d7yE
So you can use the short URL to perform more investigations about web pages mentioning it or tweets using it. If you want to see bit.ly own history about the URL you can just hit their history link, for google.com that is:
The statistics page also seems to uncover different short URL’s for the same domain which you can then use in your search. For example:
http://bit.ly/4d3xjX and http://bit.ly/676wYo both point to the NSA.
Now that sure does make things easy to continue searching, it will at least contribute to your search results by making it possible to find things(people) you would have otherwise possibly missed.
For all the people hating short URLs, you could always use www.longurl.org to verify you are not being scammed ;)
DiabloHorn 