Are you looking for more proof that Google is taking online social networking seriously, and that Google+ has some staying power? Look no further than a recent purchase by the search giant, and the many uses the digiterati are finding for one major feature of the new social network.
The purchase this time is not a company, but a URL. It's g.co, acquired from .CO Internet SAS. This organization handles .co domain names. Google's hardly the first big company to acquire one of these URLs; Twitter owns T.Co and Overstock boasts O.Co. The interesting question is what the search company will do with their brand new domain.
In that area, they're quite forthcoming. It's not going to be a URL shortener, as you might expect from Google's increased involvement on social networks; the search firm already owns the public URL shortener goo.gl. Rather, g.co will be used to host URLs that send users only to web pages on Google properties.
It's a brilliant move. As the company itself explains in a blog post, you can't always tell what website you're going to be directed to if you're clicking on a link for a shortened URL. If you know that a g.co URL will only go to websites that link to official Google products and services, you'll feel a lot safer and more confident that you won't go somewhere dangerous when you you make that click.
As Rachel King explains on ZDNet, this action by the search company will mean that seeing g.co in a link “legitimizes the link and makes it more trustworthy to the end user.” It offers other advantages, too, such as “streamlin[ing] access to Google sites in general, especially when users want to share something quickly on social media sites...Having a shorter URL also makes it easier and cheaper when using URL addresses in advertisements.”
That latter point won't actually be very useful to advertisers in this case, unless they're linking to Google properties. On the other hand, creating an ad with a link to a Blogger blog for your company – or a Google+ profile, even though businesses aren't supposed to have their own pages on Google+ yet – could represent an interesting new channel for promoting your business on the web. But don't rush to try this yet, as Google is still rolling out the service. At the time of writing, in fact, Google displayed only a landing page at g.co. We'll see how this develops.
Google Optimization 
