Huh. This is a thing I've seen at a few companies now and never seen reference to them coming out of Google. It makes sense, but it's also completely standalone - "go to the page."

A couple of the startups that do go links have blog posts on the history:

https://www.golinks.com/blog/go-links-history/

https://www.trot.to/blog/2020/07/09/go-links-origin-story

Those 2 stories kind of contradict each other. One says Benjamin Staffin invented golinks, then later another Googler built golinks in 2006. The other says Benjamin Staffin created golinks around 2009/2010.

Original author of https://github.com/trotto/go-links here! We spoke with Benjamin directly, so I trust his recollection.

It was one of the most popular “mini-services” at google along side less useful things like percent/ (which shows your tenure percentile), memegen and bunch of others, maintained by like a single engineer on the side. These were (at least to me) what was so great about Google’s early engineer-driven culture. It was like the early web app age in a sense…

I implemented this for my personal use and chose “aka/“ instead of “go/“. Still short, and still pretty self explanatory, but unique.

Especially because Golink seems to be (at least partially) written in Go

Pretty sure orignal google’s golinks predates Go the language by many years