How can I find out what a goo.gl URL leads to, without visiting it?

Question

goo.gl allows us to shorten URLs. For example, http://goo.gl/Y5VIoG will link to http://google.com

How can we determine what URL the goo.gl link points to without actually visiting it?

For example, how can we see that the link http://goo.gl/Y5VIoG points to http://google.com without actually clicking on it?

Is there an official way to do this (provided by Google instead of a 3rd party)?

Answer 1

Adding a .info after the URL will give you detailed analytics of the short URL, including:

• The full URL being pointed to
• QR Code
• Number of clicks over various timeframes
• Visitor information:
  • Referrers
  • Browsers
  • Platforms (Windows, et al.)
  • Country of origin

For instance: This question: http://goo.gl/e1kTPw.info

For a better example, here's the example link from Goo.gl Help: http://goo.gl/l6MS.info

(Note: Analytics for all goo.gl short URLs are publicly visible to all users.)

Answer 2

take a look here https://developers.google.com/url-shortener/

and example of the API running is here: https://developers.google.com/apis-explorer/#s/urlshortener/v1/urlshortener.url.get?shortUrl=http%253A%252F%252Fgoo.gl%252FY5VIoG&_h=1&

which returns:

{ "kind": "urlshortener#url", "id": "http://goo.gl/Y5VIoG", "longUrl": "http://google.com/", "status": "OK" }