Whilst playing around the old shortened URLs, it would seem that Google are now offering suggestions if the URL you try to follow is broken or incorrect. I took my profile page from the WMA website and shortened it to:
You’d expect most links to be cut and paste and more often than not be right, but if you say missed off the last character and tried following this URL in Chrome:
You will get some other suggestions from Google as to the links you are looking for:
Obviously, the alternatives have no relevance whatsoever to the original shortened link, but it’s interesting to see that Google is indexing shortened URLs to be utilised in such a way – I will be more impressed if in the future, they were to offer shortened URLs that actually link to the same domain as the initial URL which has gone wrong. I know, that’s a massive ask and near impossible to do (well, I reckon it’d be impossible) but this is Google, and they know everything on the interweb.
I think they should have developed this a bit more, maybe providing information of the target URL of the redirect itself. Twitter APIs can do it, why can’t Google?