Everyone is getting into the URL shortening game these days. Google, YouTube, and Facebook are just a few joining the likes of the established players such as Bit.ly. And now Microsoft is jumping in. But there’s something weird about their URL.
As the UK blog My Microsoft Life noticed, some of Microsoft’s Bing employees have begun publicly tweeting with the binged.it URL. Seattle PI confirmed with Microsoft that it has been used internally and is likely to be made public soon. But the odd thing about binged.it is that it’s actually one character longer than Bing’s own domain, complete with the .com part. Sure, many Bing search query URLs are going to be much longer, but then why not just shorten them using the Bing.com domain or something smaller? I don’t know how much Microsoft paid for the Bing domain, but I’m sure it wasn’t cheap. And wasn’t part of the point to be shorter than Google? Why not spring for bin.gd or something?
Google’s shortener, goo.gl, is 5 characters. Facebook’s is 4 characters. Bing’s is 8 characters. Bing.com is 7 characters. Fa.il.
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