Lowell is the founder and CEO of How-To Geek. He’s been running the show since creating the site back in 2006. Over the last decade, Lowell has personally written more than 1000 articles which have been viewed by over 250 million people. Prior to starting How-To Geek, Lowell spent 15 years working in IT doing consulting, cybersecurity, database management, and programming work. Read more.
You’ve already seen them… links to tinyurl.com left in comments, on blog posts and especially on Twitter. But doesn’t it make you slightly uneasy to click on a link without knowing where it’s going to take you?
There’s a feature on the TinyURL.com site that will show you a preview of the final destination URL, and there’s not even a login required… it just sets a cookie on your browser.
Once on the site, just click the link for “Click here to enable previews”
And now when you click on a TinyUrl link like this one…
You’ll be taken to a page on tinyurl.com that will show you the final destination link.
If you’d like to ensure that the person you are sending links to will see the preview screen even if they haven’t enabled this setting, you can add preview. before the domain name. This also works if you want to go to a TinyUrl link on a machine that doesn’t already have the cookies enabled.
I found this very useful, so hopefully it’ll also help somebody else.
A great way to avoid visiting phishing websites
With the popularity of social media and affiliate links, turning a long URL into a short one is essential. Even when Twitter increased the character count to 280, space was at a premium and brevity mattered. So being able to shorten your links is necessary.
But there is a darker side to short URLs too in that you have no idea where they are going. When you click on a short URL, you are putting blind faith in the person that they are not sending you to a phishing site or a virus download.
If it is the New York Times or the BBC, well that’s OK. You can trust big brands. But if it’s Mr MysteryMan from MysteryTown, then who knows what rabbit hole you are being taken down?
TinyURL
If you have a TinyURL link, simply replace “www” with “preview” after the “https://” like so :
This will then take you to the TinyURL website where you will be told the long URL.
A link is provided to take you to the site if you deem it safe.
Bitly
If you find yourself with a Bitly link and you don’t know where it goes, then just add a “+” onto the end of the URL, like so :
Then you will be taken to the Bitly site where it will display the long URL.
All looking good? Then click the “Copy” link which gives you the short URL without the “+” sign. Copy and paste into your browser and off you go.
Use An Online Service
If you prefer, you can use an online service to run all short URLs through. In this area though, there are so many choices for URL expanders that it can be difficult to know which one to use.
I particularly like CheckShortURL. After entering the short URL, it will bring back the long URL, as well as a thumbnail picture of the page, and other useful links such as checking the safety of the page.
At the end of the day, the golden rule should always be “if in doubt, don’t click that link”. Nothing is worth risking a virus for, or having your account details hacked by a phisher. But tips like this help to draw the curtain back just a little bit and show you where the link is trying to take you.
Mark O’Neill is a British award-winning fiction author now living in Würzburg, Germany. He is the creator of the acclaimed Department 89 spy thriller series and the Scorpion novels. Read Mark’s Full Bio
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TinyURL is an online URL shortener service. It takes a long link that may be many dozens of characters in length, and it turns it into a relatively tiny link. The shorter link is easier to handle, but it can also mask the identity of the site that the link leads to. If you are uncertain of the reliability of a TinyURL link, you can take steps to check the link’s safety.
Tiny URLs, Big Problems
When TinyURL shortens a long web address, it creates a link in the form of letters and numbers that look nothing like the original. A short link may in fact lead to a scam website or one loaded with spyware, viruses or inappropriate content. Even if you trust the person sending you the link, it’s safer to check it first before clicking on it.
How TinyURL Works
TinyURL is a link shortener. Let’s say you start with a very long link that looks like this:
After entering the long URL into the TinyURL.com text box, the URL shortener converts it to a tiny link, or at least, a tinier link:
Long URLs can be very difficult to type by hand; any mistake will take you to the wrong page or none at all. A shortened link such as the example above is much easier to type.
TinyURL users can also customize the shortened link. For example:
If someone sends you a TinyURL link and you are unsure of its credibility, there are a few ways to check the link safely.
Use the TinyURL Preview Function
Before clicking an unknown TinyURL link, head to the TinyURL website or a similar site. On the left side, you’ll see a menu of site options. Click on Preview Feature and then click on Click here to enable previews. This will place a cookie on your computer that will display the original link to you when you click a TinyURL rather than sending you directly to the site. Once you see the original URL, you can decide whether to click through to the final destination site.
The “Preview_”_ function will work for all future TinyURL links that you use, as long as the feature remains enabled.
Add Preview to the Link
If you don’t want to enable the TinyURL cookie, you can add the word “preview” to the TinyURL to display the original link. If your TinyURL is:
add the word “preview” before “.tinyurl”:
to safely display the original URL without the need to go to the actual site.
Use a URL Decoder
There are several services online that will decode a TinyURL for you. For example, TrueURL.net will take a TinyURL and “unravel” it so you can see the original URL.
Other URL shorteners are available online in addition to TinyURL. Services like TrueURL will decode these other URLs as well; whereas, the TinyURL preview only works for TinyURL links.
Warning
Decoding a TinyURL shows you the original site address. But this information alone is no guarantee the link is safe to click on. Use the same precaution for a decoded TinyURL link as you would for any unfamiliar site that you are visiting on the internet.
Shortened URLs, such as those from bit.ly and goo.gl, make it easy to type in a web address quickly but hard to tell where your web browser will actually take you.
- Before clicking a shortened URL, check for the full URL. Most URL shorteners—including those used at U-M— include a preview feature. If you aren’t sure it is safe, don’t click!
- Before creating or sharing a shortened URL, consider alternatives. If you must use one, make clear where it goes.
- Be aware that criminals use shortened URLs to direct people to phishing sites and initiate malware downloads.
Before You Click, Reveal Full URLs
There are a number of ways you can reveal the full URL behind a shortened URL:
- Use the shortening service preview feature. Type the shortened URL in the address bar of your web browser and add the characters described below to see a preview of the full URL:
- tinyurl.com. Between the “ and the “tinyurl,” type preview.
Example: http://preview. - bit.ly. At the end of the URL, type a +.
Example: + - goo.gl. At the end of the URL, type a +.
Example: +
- tinyurl.com. Between the “ and the “tinyurl,” type preview.
- Use a URL checker. These are just a few of the sites that let you enter a short URL and then see the full URL:
- getlinkinfo.com
- unshorten.it
- urlxray.com
Shortened URLs at U-M
A number of university units use URL shorteners for official university use. You can trust these.
URLs that begin with are created with a URL shortener maintained by the U-M Office of the Vice President for Communications and used primarily by UMSocial and other official U-M social media accounts. Departments interested in obtaining shortened U-M URLs or access to the tool for social media or print use can contact [email protected]
Preview the full URL by adding + to the end. Example:
Michigan Medicine is using shortened URLs that begin with
Preview the full URL by adding + to the end. Examples: and
The College of Engineering is using shortened URLs that begin with
Preview the full URL by adding + to the end. Example:- and
These shortened URLs are used by the School of Information. Examples: and
Before You Shorten a URL, Consider Alternatives
Some people will be suspicious—and rightly so—if you use shortened URLs in email or in your online or print materials. In general, do what you can to make it clear to people where they will go if they click or type the URL you provide.
- Use descriptive link text with the full URL. In emails and on web pages, it is best to use descriptive link text with the full URL behind it. That lets people know where they will go if they click; they can hover over the link with their mouse to see the full URL. It is also a recommended best practice for accessibility, because it provides people who use screen readers with clear, complete information.
Example: Visit Safe Computing for information about IT security and privacy at U-M. - Don’t use a shortened URL if people must log in. If you are directing people to a page that requires login, let them see the full URL and tell them login will be required.
Example: Access your My LINC assigned training at maislinc.umich.edu(U-M login required). - Be clear about the destination when you must use short URLs. On social media platforms, such as Twitter, you may need to use a shortened URL to stay within a character limit. It is helpful to let people know where the short URL will take them.
How Criminals Use Shortened URLs
Criminals use shortened URLs to:
- Direct people to phishing websites—sites that ask you to log in or fill in a form and then steal your password and/or personal information. Always Look Before You Log In.
- Initiate download of malicious software, such as ransomware, to your device.
If you are suspicious of a shortened URL, don’t click it.
If you ever come across a link in email or on a website, always hover your mouse cursor over it to see the destination URL at the bottom of the browser to ensure it’s safe. But, this trick doesn’t work with shortened URLs that are quite common these days on social media websites.
However, this also doesn’t mean you have to facecheck every short URL and risk your security. There are multiple ways to check what’s behind a shortened URL without opening it. And in this post, I’ll show you how to do it on your PC and your smartphone.
Use the built-in preview
Most of the popular link shortening services let you preview the link by tweaking the shortened URL. Just memorize these simple tweaks, and for most short URLs you won’t have to depend on a third-party service. Below is the list of preview tweaks:
TinyURL
Add preview before the tinyurl.com part of the link. For example:
convert to
Goo.gl
Add + (plus sign) at the end of the original URL. For example, convert into .
Bitly.com
Similar to Goo.gl, add a + at the end of the URL.
Add – (hyphen) at the end of the URL. For example, convert into .
Tiny.cc
(tilde) at the end of the URL.
BudURL
Add ? (question mark) at the end of the URL.
Use an online service
If you don’t deal with short URLs often, then an online expander may work better for you. For this purpose, I like GetLinkInfo for its extensive support of URL shortening websites and detailed information about the link. Just paste the link on the website and press enter.
GetLinkInfo will tell you the main title of the page, starting description, exact long URL, and any external links on the page. It also uses Google to check the safety of the website content.
Use a browser extension
In case you deal with short URLs frequently, then a dedicated browser extension is a better choice. Unshorten.It! is a good extension for this purpose that is available for both Chrome and Firefox.
The cool thing about Unshorten.It! is that it doesn’t depend on the URL shortening service’s API, therefore, it can expand almost all types of short links. Once the extension is installed, right-click on any short link and select Unshorten it from the menu. The extension will expand the link in a new tab and also show safety information based on the Web Of Trust score.
I also really liked the non-intrusive nature of the extension as it allows you to choose which links to expand and which to leave.
Expand short URLs on Android
On Android, you can use the free URL Manager app. This is actually an all-in-one link manager, but we will only be Looking at the expanding feature of the app. Here’s how to expand a link:
- Copy the short URL that you want to expand.
- Tap on the + icon in its main interface and select Expand.
- Now paste the URL into the text field and tap on Expand. The original link will be shown below.
You can also share a link directly from your browser to expand it in URL Manager.
Expand short URLs on iOS
On iOS, you can use the free URL X-ray app. Although URL X-ray is popular for its web service, its iOS app does a fine job of expanding URLs. Once installed, you can copy/paste the short URL in the URL X-ray interface to expand it. It also adds a button in the share menu to let you directly share URLs from other apps.
Summing up
You should be very careful while opening short links and always check what’s on the other side before opening, especially if you received them via email or a direct message. Memorizing short URL preview tweaks might involve some work, but it will make the process very easy if you deal with short URLs often. But of course, you can always get help from a third-party app when you are in doubt.
Bitly and TinyURL are popular URL shortening tools for good reason. Registered users can create shortened URLs that people can actually spell to use in place of unwieldly URLs. I often use Bitly to shorten the links to my Google Slides and Canva slides presentations.
Unfortunately, not all Bitly and TinyURL users are using those tools for good reasons. Some people use them to hide nefarious links.
The “+” Trick
Fortunately, there is an easy way to quickly determine what’s behind a Bitly or TinyURL link without actually clicking on it. The trick is to simply add a “+” to the end of any Bitly or TinyURL address. 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.
You can try this trick with a URL that I recently shortened. will lead you directly to a copy of the slides that I used in my recent Intro to Teaching History With Technology webinar. will lead you to the Bitly page where you can see my original presentation URL and see when I created the shortened URL.
If you want to try this with a TinyURL, will lead you to the page for the Practical Ed Tech Virtual Summer Camp, but adding a “+” at the end of that TinyURL will take you to the page where you can see the original link without clicking on it.
Building Good Cyber Safety Skills
Building good digital citizenship and cyber safety skills is something that all of us should be helping our students do. Showing them little tips like this one to avoid clicking on suspicious links is one of the ways that we can help our students build their digital citizenship and cyber safety skills.
The Global Guide to Research Impact
Social Media
- Vimeo
- RSS
As websites have become more complex, the length of web addresses (URLs) has grown, and they have become increasingly unwieldy. Hot links and hyperlinks are fine if you are sure your reader will be online, but sometimes using a link that can be noted down easily and visited at a later date is more appropriate. Short URLs are good for printed publicity material, and also useful when including web links in Twitter, where messages can only be 140 characters long.
The website Tiny URL converts URLs of any length into much smaller ones (20 characters on average). It’s very simple to use, and has two great new features. You can now customise your tiny URL so that it is memorable rather than random. In addition, at the time you create your tiny URL you can activate a tracking option that will enable you to gather statistics about how many people click on the URL that you’ve created.
To make a tiny URL go to Simply paste into the box your long URL and click on the orange ‘Tiny it!’ button. Your new tiny URL of five random characters (for example ) will appear.
But before you click, why not customise your tiny URL? The standard URL for R4D’s Communications Corner is but we made a tiny URL for the same page: by putting ‘CommsCorner’ in the ‘Custom’ box. (Note you can also use as the prefix.) One warning: Don’t experiment with your preferred Custom phrase – once you’ve used it, it’s gone and you can never delete or edit it! Yes, I did lose one myself.
Finally, why not use tiny URLs to track your traffic statistics for particular marketing efforts? Note: you must set this up immediately after you create the tiny URL. After you click the ‘Tiny it!’ button, a line will appear that says: ‘Track how many people click your tiny link here’. Clicking the ‘here’ hyperlink at that time will take you to a traffic stats web page for that tiny URL. Save the address of that webpage somewhere safe, and you can return and check how many people have used your tiny URL. Each tiny URL has its own statistics page (with unique ID and code).
I’m going to make all the links in the R4D monthly e-newsletter tiny URLs from now on. A click will still take the reader straight to the news story or new document on R4D, but I will be able to see which links interest people most and try to respond. If you don’t already receive the newsletter you can sign up here.
Have you used Tiny URLs or other URL-shrinking systems?
Can you recommend especially appropriate ways to use them?
Have you used them to track your click stastics?
Below are some frequently asked questions about t.co, Twitter’s link-shortening service.
How does link shortening work?
Links shared on Twitter, including links shared in Direct Messages, will automatically be processed and shortened to an link. Learn how to shorten links. Please note: anyone with a t.co shortened link will be able to navigate to the destination URL.
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Why does Twitter have its own link shortener?
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- Shortened links allow you to share long URLs in a Tweet while maintaining the maximum number of characters for your message.
- Our link service measures information such as how many times a link has been clicked, which is an important quality signal in determining how relevant and interesting each Tweet is when compared to similar Tweets.
- Having a link shortener protects users from malicious sites that engage in spreading malware, phishing attacks, and other harmful activity. A link converted by Twitter’s link service is checked against a list of potentially dangerous sites. Users are warned with the error message below when clicking on potentially harmful URLs.В
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If the URL of a site you manage has been flagged, please see this help page about flagged URLs for more information.
Can I opt out of link shortening when I post links on Twitter?
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Because of the reasons listed above, Twitter will shorten URLs you post on Twitter. You cannot opt out of link shortening.В
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The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
The inspiration for this blog post came to me when I was lying on my sofa reading the Guardian newspaper over the weekend. I was at home and so didn’t have any of the following to hand:
- iphone
- pen
- regular phone
- internet
Now, you might think they’re not really essential tools for reading a newspaper but you’d be wrong. While reading the paper I was struck, time and time again, by the use of TinyURL to encode long links into a newsprint format. Of course, not having any of the above tools, I had no way of either visiting the URL or noting it down for me to visit later.
Being a kind of lazy person (it was Sunday afternoon, give me a break!), rather than look up the tinyurl online or noting it down for later reference, I just shrugged my shoulders, decided I wasn’t THAT interested in visiting the link anyway, and moved on to the next article. For me, this is a huge wasted opportunity for the paper and also a frustrating experience for the reader. So what’s the solution? Well, before I dive into the solution, let me explain the problem a little more clearly.
Why do newspapers use TinyURL at the moment?
The overriding reason I can see for newspapers to use TinyURL at the moment is that it’s short. Printing tinyurls saves valuable space which otherwise might be wasted. Printing a URL like this:
Takes up much less space than printing a URL like this:
And even less than a URL like this:
Given the popularity of tinyurl, I’ve seen many many examples of them in the real world, ranging from the Guardian to the WPT magazine all the way up to the New Scientist. In short, almost everyone is using them. And they should all stop.
What’s wrong with newspapers using TinyURL?
I touched on some of the reasons why they don’t work that well above in my heart-rending tale of an internet marketer too lazy to move off the sofa, but here’s the complete list:
- You can’t remember them. “Oh great, an article about quantum physics, that looks really interesting. I must remember to check out tinyurl slash x x 2 3 5 h j next time I’m at a computer.” This makes them difficult to use unless you physically take your paper to your computer or you happen to have a photographic memory. (I know that these days you can now choose a custom alias for your tinyurls, but none of the newspapers use them.)
- There’s no branding. When you see a tinyurl you are effectively clicking blind – you have no idea what kind of site you’re being taken to and there’s no trace of the site you’ve come from.
- No tracking! Tracking, tracking ,tracking. The mantra of everything you do online has been lost when you use TinyURL – you don’t know how many people clicked the link, you don’t know if for some reason one of your TinyURLs was copied and pasted into an email to 1000s of people. You just don’t know. (I know that some services offer pretty neat tracking services, especially bit.ly, but that doesn’t negate the other points listed here.)
- No control over the URL shortening service. Do you trust TinyURL? How long might they be around for? What happens if they have a massive data outage tomorrow and all your URLs 404? Think that’s farfetched? Check out zi.ma – this used to be a URL shortening service and now all the URLs 404. Over 67,000 links to the zi.ma domain!
What should they do instead?
Build their own URL shortening service for use exclusively by their journalists! To a technophobe like myself this seems like a lot of work, but I’m assured that it really rather simple to build a service like this – Rob knocked up Twadl, a URL shortening service in a weekend (not to belittle your achievements, Rob!).
What advantages would this have?
Well imagine that instead of using a TinyURL the Guardian used a URL like this:
This would then allow them to get around most of the downsides listed above: short URLs that they have control over, are able to track and are stamped with the Guardian’s brand. There’s one problem though that this doesn’t solve.
What about the problem of remembering these short URLs?
So using either of the two formats above (one being date & numerical based and the other being alias-based), they’re still not that memorable, so how do you get around this? How about creating a links page on the newspaper site which lists all the recent short-links that have been used and a brief, twitter-like description of what the link is? That way, not only do you know where to go when you forget a short link, but that page becomes like an editorial Digg or Reddit page which can demand a high volume of traffic in its own right. After all, the external links that are being dropped into the paper every day are a valuable commodity – people are always on the lookout for interesting thing to click on, and that’s exactly what that page offers.
Examples from the wild
Two examples from the UK press, one doing it well and one doing it badly:
The good – The Metro use short redirect URLs quite regularly to direct traffic; for example, check out which 301 redirects to a metro blog post.
The bad – Check out this page from the Guardian, which links to no fewer than 13 tinyurls. Regardless of your position on using TinyURLs in the print version of the paper, there’s absolutely no reason to use them in the online version!
About Tom Critchlow —
Tom Critchlow is VP Operations for Distilled’s new NYC office. Fiercely curious about life and passionate about learning new things.
How to design a system that takes big URLs like “ and converts them into a short 6 character URL. It is given that URLs are stored in the database and every URL has an associated integer id.
One important thing to note is, the long URL should also be uniquely identifiable from the short URL. So we need a Bijective Function
We strongly recommend that you click here and practice it, before moving on to the solution.
One Simple Solution could be Hashing. Use a hash function to convert long string to short string. In hashing, that may be collisions (2 long URLs map to same short URL) and we need a unique short URL for every long URL so that we can access long URL back.
A Better Solution is to use the integer id stored in the database and convert the integer to a character string that is at most 6 characters long. This problem can basically seen as a base conversion problem where we have a 10 digit input number and we want to convert it into a 6 character long string.
Below is one important observation about possible characters in URL.
A URL character can be one of the following
1) A lower case alphabet [‘a’ to ‘z’], total 26 characters
2) An upper case alphabet [‘A’ to ‘Z’], total 26 characters
3) A digit [‘0’ to ‘9’], total 10 characters
There are total 26 + 26 + 10 = 62 possible characters.
So the task is to convert a decimal number to base 62 number.
To get the original long URL, we need to get URL id in the database. The id can be obtained using base 62 to decimal conversion.
