Google today said it had acquired the domain name “G.CO”, a name that the company says it will use exclusively to link to official Google products and services, helping users be more confident that when they click on a “G.CO” link, they are taken what should be a safe URL, operated by Google.
According to .CO Internet S.A.S, the Registry Operator for the .CO top-level domain, since it launched, the .CO domain has attracted more than one million registrations by individuals, organizations and businesses in more than 200 countries worldwide, including major brands like Twitter, Amazon and Overstock – and hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs around the globe.
In an announcement on the official Google Blog today, Gary Briggs, Google’s VP of Consumer Marketing, announced that G.CO would soon be the official URL shortcut for Google websites. “The shorter a URL, the easier it is to share and remember. The downside is, you often can’t tell what website you’re going to be redirected to. We’ll only use g.co to send you to webpages that are owned by Google, and only we can create g.co shortcuts,” said Briggs; that means “you can visit a G.CO shortcut confident you will always end up at a page for a Google product or service.”
In 2009, Google launched its public URL shortener, goo.gl, a service that Google says will continue as the public URL shortener that anybody can use to shorten URLs across the web.
