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Cambrian House began as a crowdsourcing community using a wisdom of crowds based approach to discover new business and technology ideas. These pages are being kept online as a technology demo to showcase Chaordix™.

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URL Cacher + Shortener

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  • Submitted by: branchcut
  • Created: Jul 17, 2006, 10:54 am
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The Idea

Paste a URL into an input box and the site will create a shortened URL that has a special feature: if at any point the content "goes missing", the cached content will be shown instead of redirecting to the live content. As an example, say you are writing a document about how to build cars, and you find an in depth tutorial on starter motors and you want to link to it. If you create a direct link, chances are in a few years the link will be broken, and your tutorial on cars is going to be less useful. However, if you use the proposed site to generate a special URL like http://xxx.com/starter_motors, the person clicking the link will always be able to see the cached version of the tutorial on starter motors. This could happen either automatically if the live site is down or returning a 404, or manually by inserting a toolbar in the top frame that has a "show from cache" button -- to be used in case the live site shows anything aside from the desired content.

I thought of this idea when I was...

.. totally frustrated while watching my documentation detoriate over time as things I linked out to slowly but surely disappeared. Then I would spend a lot of time desperately trying to find the lost item through Google and many times would come up empty. This idea has some overlap with Google Cache and the Wayback Machine, but both of those have one problem: it makes the reader "go hunting" for missing material, which is a burden and a waste of time. The system should automatically show cached material if live material cannot be found. It might not even be necessary to build something from scratch, and it could be a mashup that leveraged Google Cache and/or the Wayback Machine. If built from scratch, Amazon S3 could be leveraged for cheap and scalable data storage backend.


Comments Posted

the_profit__sic_
the_profit__sic_ Posted: July 24, 2006, 4:37 pm

this is a cool idea, but it might be difficult to break into the market- my perception is that tinyurl has a lock, but I may be way off base

maybe insert a frame on top of the page to the cached version for ad revenue

 

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