Google Buys G.Co As Official URL Shortcut For Google Products

Google announced today that it will start using a new URL shortcut that's much shorter than the original Goo.gl. Reports this morning surfaced that the search giant had purchased the domain G.Co for use with Google products such as GMail, Documents, and Photos. The company has confirmed the new shortcut domain but did not reveal the cost to acquire it, which is estimated to be at least $1.5 million.

The .Co TLD is not as popular yet, but many other large companies and startups have already begun adopting it. Amazon currently has A.Co, Z.Co, and K.Co while Twitter has T.Co and Overstock as O.Co. The .Co domain registrar is actually run out of Colombia with the support of the government, but thanks to the adoption by the tech industry, it is now more known to represent "company" instead.

Google plans to use its G.Co as a shortcut to all its products and services with some of the domains to go live later this afternoon. Heading to the G.Co site right now brings up a message reassuring users that all G.Co shortcuts will take you to an official Google product or service.

The Goo.gl shortcut that the company acquired back in 2009, will not be discarded. It will continue to be available to the public for use to shorten URLs across the web. The G.Co shortcuts, however, can only be created by Google themselves and will only point to products owned by Google.

[via TechCrunch]