If you’re a Twitter user, you already know how to shorten URLs using free services like TinyURL, etc. It’s great when you want to share a URL that is really long via email, IM, or Twitter.
I’ve also previously written about services that let you convert paragraphs of text into a short URL or combine multiple links into one link. But what about sharing a Google search result with someone else?
You can simply perform a Google search and copy/paste the URL, but again, it’s long and ugly. Not only that, but it contains user specific information such as the browser, etc.
If you want to quickly share a Google search query with someone, you can use a free service called Gog.is.
Gog.is is powered by Google App Engine and is very easy to use. The good thing about it is that you do not have to visit the site in order to shorten a Google search query. To use it just type in gog.is followed by the keywords.
For example, if you wanted to get a short URL to the search results for “Aseem Kishore”, just type in the following:
http://gog.is/aseem kishore or
http://gog.is/aseem/kishore or
You can also use prefixes with gog.is to shorten URLS for searches on Products, Books, News, Finance, Wikepedia, etc. For example, for a Google news search, you would type in the following:
You can also use one letter for short form, such as
You can use s for Google shopping results, b for book search, q for Google finance, w for the first hit from Wikipedia, and m for the first hit on IMDB.
If you have a program installed on your computer that helps you to quickly launch applications like Launchy or Executor, then you can also setup a keyboard shortcut so that you can simply press one key to paste the gog.is part into the address bar. You could use this service as a quick way to perform a Google search if you don’t already have something else setup. Enjoy!
The same type of service, but with a nicer looking page, can be found at:
http://look.fo
or the “Feeling Lucky” version, at:
http://str8.to