Google has announced in a blog post that the company has acquired the g.co domain as its new URL shortener for official Google products and services. The move was made to create URLs that are easier for users to remember and more easily distributed across the social Web.
Google’s vice president of consumer marketing Gary Briggs writes in the post:
In the world of URLs, bigger is not always better. In 2009, we helped shrink up long, unwieldy URLs by launching our public URL shortener, goo.gl. Today, we’re announcing a new URL shortcut that will only link to official Google products and services: g.co.
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.
There’s no need to fret about the fate of goo.gl; we like it as much as you do, and nothing is changing on that front. It will continue to be our public URL shortener that anybody can use to shorten URLs across the web.