At Google we have a humongous amount of tools to ease our workday, from things that are available to the public like Google Workspace or Google Meet, to internal tools like gThanks or go links. Go links in particular is something that after joining Google I can’t quite live without. They solve one simple problem, the ability to remember urls to useful tools or documents. Since almost everything at Google is web based, having a low friction between your intent to access a tool and getting to the tool itself is really useful. The actual go links are a special kind of custom links in the shape of go/link that you can create to your heart’s content and share with your org.

So when using go links, instead of having to remember or bookmark a complete url to something that you find useful, you create your own custom go link using whichever words make sense to you:

• https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/intro.html becomes go/ts-handbook
• https://www.typescriptlang.org/play becomes go/ts-playround
• https://reactjs.org/docs/getting-started.html becomes go/react-docs
• https://drive.google.com/drive/my-drive becomes go/drive
• https://www.barbarianmeetscoding.com/boost-your-coding-fu-with-vscode-and-vim becomes go/learn-vscodevim
• https://www.strava.com/dashboard becomes go/run

If you still don’t quite get the awesomeness of go links, here’s a nice video explainer:

Although one could roll their own version of go links, I’ve found three products that seem to bring the awesomeness of go links to the masses:

• golinks.io has a paid version focused on teams
• trot.to has a teams and a personal version. It’s open source and its source code is available on GitHub
• And there’s this go link Chrome extension which gives you the ability to setup your own personal go links

Since I already have go links at Google, I’ve settled for using trot.to for my private enjoyment. It works great. You download an extension, log in and anytime you find anything interesting that you’d like to have a go link for. You can type go/something on the browser url field to create a new go link. Seamlesssssss.