Additional redirs - Githubissues

newhouse / url-tracking-stripper

An open-source Chrome Extension that will remove the tracking parameters from URLs to keep them short and cleaner for sharing, bookmarking, etc. It will also skip any known redirects and take you straight to the target URL instead of passing you through an intermediate URL.

MIT License

192 stars 26 forks source link

Additional redirs #50

Open wumpus opened 6 years ago

wumpus commented 6 years ago

//youtu.be/foo => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foo

Also y2u.be works like youtu.be but is not run by google (!) That can't be good

https://redd.it/7tczf9 => https://www.reddit.com/tb/7tczf9

https://app.instapage.com/route/9475232/?url=www.nat.ai/careers => http://www.nat.ai/careers

wumpus commented 6 years ago

BTW related but not related, I have a list of ~ 30 domain shorteners plus 3,200 "bit.ly custom shortners" -- these are often used to add tracking cgi args to links that look like they don't have any, but it's hard to do anything useful with them in the context of your extension; you are already just following them and then stripping the args off of the redirect...

newhouse commented 6 years ago

Regarding your comment above: yeah, unless there's a way to expand or figure out what the ultimate target is from the shortened link itself, I'm not sure there's anything we can really do without following it first. Are you aware of any way?

Regarding this example https://app.instapage.com/route/9475232/?url=www.nat.ai/careers => http://www.nat.ai/careers:

Could you provide some more examples like this? I'm assuming the other ones you provided (youtu.be/foo, redd.it/foo) are as straightforward as they seem, but this one has a path in it, and one with a random-looking integer to-boot.
Trying to figure out the pattern. For example, is it https://app.instapage.com/route/<integer>/?url=<target> or https://app.instapage.com/<random_path>/?url=<target> or literally always https://app.instapage.com/route/9475232/?url=<target>...

wumpus commented 6 years ago

I'm pretty sure the integer is a customer number.

 https://app.instapage.com/route/4619387/?url=www.sweatflix.com/disclaimer
 https://app.instapage.com/route/7664466/?url=escuelachilenaoratoria.cl/Postgrados_Eneb

Instapage is a small business -- 615 hosts in the top 15 million, I probably should have left them off the list. Now that I look more carefully, more than half of instapage sites only have a single page.

And you are correct, for the real shorteners there's no easy way to find out the link without asking the shortener. I'm thinking of providing a service to disintermediate, just because I (and every other search engine person) hate them with a passion...

iki commented 6 years ago

@newhouse there're also many more redirects in https://github.com/nokeya/direct-links-out. Should I convert them to a PR?