The other technique I used in my example was to use the link I copied from the Google search results. With goo.gl you can have a look at the statistics by adding “.info” at the end of the URL. In the case of a bit.ly URL you can view this by simply adding a “+ “ sign at the end of the URL, like this. Some URL shortening services also offer the option to check the URLs by looking at the statistics of that URL. But if you actually click it you “should” end up on my profile at the Malwarebytes Unpacked blog. The preview above for URL could lead you to believe that you will visit some Google results. Time for another quick glance at our example. So sites like and started to come up, where you can preview shortened links from many, many URL shortening services. Without offering preview services obviously. So when sites like started to offer a site where we can preview where their shortened links lead, scammers started using their own URL shorteners. In the URL we see bit.ly and that tells the experienced reader we are dealing with a shortened URL, because is one of the sites that offers a shortening service.įor scammers the fact that the victim can’t see where the URL leads is a big advantage. First of all we have to hover over the link the read the URL. Consider for example this URL : safe to click. Scammers have been known to use this technique to trick their victims into visiting sites. URL shortening was used to circumvent blacklists, beautify links you would normally never had clicked and fool people into thinking they were visiting a site while it was just an imitation. The URL shorteners can also have their usefulness if the receiver has to manually type the URL instead of copy and paste it.Īs with many other things, soon after the “use” came the “abuse”. Twitter, who use their own shortening-service at t.co). URL shorteners were invented to enable users to post URLs in messages where they only have a (very) limited number of tokens to send (e.g. Most of the times when people use this term they will mean a clickable link to a website. Bit.ly/THWTAPRIL+ will lead you to the Bitly page where you can see my original presentation URL and see when I created the shortened URL.A URL (uniform resource locator) is a pointer to a web resource (usually a site) and a mechanism to retrieve it. Bit.ly/THWTAPRIL will lead you directly to a copy of the slides that I used in my recent Intro to Teaching History With Technology webinar. You can try this trick with a URL that I recently shortened. When you add the “+” the URL will redirect to the Bitly or TinyURL page (respectively) on which the shortened URL is hosted and will show you what the original link was. The trick is to simply add a “+” to the end of any Bitly or TinyURL address. The “+” Trickįortunately, there is an easy way to quickly determine what’s behind a Bitly or TinyURL link without actually clicking on it. Some people use them to hide nefarious links. Unfortunately, not all Bitly and TinyURL users are using those tools for good reasons. I often use Bitly to shorten the links to my Google Slides and Canva slides presentations. Registered users can create shortened URLs that people can actually spell to use in place of unwieldly URLs. Bitly and TinyURL are popular URL shortening tools for good reason.
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