Glossary
Short link
A brief URL that redirects to a longer one, used to make links shareable, printable, and countable.
The structure is a domain and a back-half: example.com/spring. The domain is the part a reader recognises, and the back-half is the key the server looks up.
Shortening solves three separate problems that get conflated. It fits a URL into a place with a character limit or no room for a query string. It makes a URL something a person can read aloud or type off a poster. And it puts a redirect in the middle, which is the only reason the click can be measured at all.
The tradeoff is that a short link hides its destination, which is exactly why phishing uses them and why the domain a link wears carries so much weight.
