Have you ever clicked on a short URL only to find that it opened up an unwanted porn site that you couldn’t close without resetting your browser? Or how about a website that infected your computer with malware? Now you can browse with confidence and increased security. Avoid phishing, malware, and viruses by examining short URLs before visiting them. Find out where links really take you.
TinyURL and other like services solved a problem brought on by the advent of micro-blogging-limited message length. They do this by taking (sometimes incredibly long) URLs and creating a small compact one that redirects to the original.
Solving one problem, though, created another one: obfuscation. There’s no way to tell (for sure) where a shortened link goes by just looking at it. So, then I could send this link http://is.gd/eTqi6 and tell you to check out the photos from my recent trip, when in fact I’m sending you to my company website. This is bad for users.
To help with this situation many URL shortening services provide some sort of “preview” feature that lets you see where a link will take you before actually going there. But, yet again, this creates another problem. With so many URL shortening services, each with their own way of previewing URLs, it would be troublesome for developers to try and support a preview feature for all the services. This is where LongURL comes in: it provides a standard API for multiple URL shortening services.
Click here to get information on a short URL. Find out where it goes and more!
