Tiny URL directory project - Intro

URL shortening services are used by many people for various reasons. The aim of this project is to build a search engine for the longer URLs hidden behind these and produce interesting statistics on the URLs themselves.

Tiny URL directory project - Spider

This project used a javascript powered spider to interface to a Dapper API. Which in turn used TinyURL's preview feature to resolve shortened URLs.

This project started in 10/06/2007 and ran until 21/07/2010, URL resolutions were performed every 30 seconds while a visitor stayed on this page. In total 113376 resolutions were made. Although this figure could of been much higher if a more brute force method was used, a maximum of a lookup per 30 seconds ensured that the TinyURL service or this site was affected by the project.

Project results were stored in a MySQL database for later analysis.

Tiny URL directory project - Search

The search interface below is written in perl and uses our own Mungo perl framework with DBIx::Class for the database backend.

Tiny URL directory project - Interesting searches

Here is a selection of the sort of data you see hidden in shortened URLs.

• Passwords
• HTML tags
• Javascript (view the HTML source)
• Login forms
• Sessions passed in the query string
• Usernames (and passwords!)

This directory was powered by Embiggen which is under the Creative Commons licence.