Google joins the .CO club with g.co, promises goo.gl will remain open to the public

Google has gone .CO.  Today, Google announced that it has adopted http://g.co as its internal short URL for all official links to its services and products.

Google joins other major international sites that have adopted their own short-url address, such as TechCrunch, tcrn.ch; New York Times, nyti.ms; Amazon, amzn.to; and Yahoo!, y.ahoo.it among others.

Google even joins a small number of companies have also opted for single letter .CO short URLS, including Twitter with t.co, Overstock with o.co, and GoDaddy with x.co.

The company says that it adopted the g.CO domain to provide consumers with peace of mind that when they click on a shortened Google URL they can trust the link they are going to is genuine, “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 only use g.co to send you 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.”

Read more about uncovering long URLs from short ones here.

Google said that the adoption of g.CO will not affect its public URL shortener, goo.gl.  The g.CO domain will be only be be used by Google (in the same say only The New York Times uses nyti.ms when it tweets), while goo.gl will be open to the public to use.

Launching the short URL today Gary Briggs, Google’s VP for Consumer Marketing took time in Google’s blog post to thank .CO Internet SAS (@dotco), the operators of the .CO domain, for helping them access the g.CO domain name, “We’d like to thank our friends at .CO Internet SAS who operate .co domain names for facilitating the acquisition of g.GO, and keep your eyes open as we start rolling out g.GO as our official URL shortcut for Google websites.”

.CO Internet SAS welcomed Google to the .CO domain family in a tweet a few moments ago.  We at theSociable would also like to welcome Google to the club.

https://twitter.com/dotco/status/93063225788203008″ data-datetime=”2011-07-18T21:02:56+00:00