On Fri, 22 Nov 2002, C Falconer wrote: > Cool idea - but the user doesn't know what site the link is to and can't > judge the usefulness of the link. > > http://makeashorterlink.com/?O2AD32682 > http://makeashorterlink.com/?P57D22682 > http://makeashorterlink.com/?V2BD22682 > > Which of these is useful, which is strange, and which is just plain > wrong? ...
Yes, the problem is obvious, it is a little bit like dialling a mobile phone number without knowing to whom it belongs. However, they can only create these short links by exploiting the hugely excessive redundancy in "normal" URLs. By removing most of the redundancy, and still coding it unambiguously, they get to the shorter links. The loss of human intelligibility is almost unavoidable if you have a simple piece of software do this. Certainly, a human theoretically could do this much nicer, like change www.canterbury.ac.nz/whateverunnecessarilylongfilenametheymightthinkof.html [Nothing against UC! I just chose it because someone from UC brought it up] to www.canterbury.ac.nz/toolongname.html which is much shorter, but has similar semantics of the filename. BUT, this would require that you first check if that filename does not already exist, and then, it would have to be the UC server itself who would have to provide it, and not some external service. Of course, they could still make shorturls.com/uc.ac.nz/toolongname.html from it at an external service called shorturls.com . But the translation of filenames, maintaining the semantics of the name, and this under the boundary condition that ambiguities are strictly forbidden, is anything else than trivial and would at least require some fancy AI thing. I do not say it is impossible, but it might cost a lot. The thing they have done lacks beauty, but seems to be comparatively simple and straightforward. Cheers, Helmut. +----------------+ | Helmut Walle | | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | +----------------+
