Click TinyURL Links Without Getting Into Embarrassing Situations

decode-tinyurl Say you are sitting inside the office cubicle and get an email or a twitter alert from an old college friend that goes something like this:

“Hey! This website is cool, check it out - http://tinyurl.com/161.”

You are tempted to click the link but the problem is that you have no clue if that TinyURL link will transport you to some safe-for-work website or not.

Now if you don’t want to get into an embarrassing situation but still would like to check out websites that are redirected through TinyURL, here’s a simple trick:

Go to tinyurl.com and enable the preview feature. This will set a cookie in your browser that will prevent TinyURL from automatically redirected you to the main site - it will only display the underlying web address but won’t take you there.

The other option is that you add the word “preview” to the main URL itself (tinyurl.com/161 => preview.tinyurl.com/161) - use this if you want to check for safe URLs occasionally else the previous trick is better.

Related: TinyURL for Sharing Adult NSFW Links

Amit Agarwal

Amit Agarwal

Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud Champion

Amit Agarwal is a Google Developer Expert in Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science (I.I.T.) and is the first professional blogger in India.

Amit has developed several popular Google add-ons including Mail Merge for Gmail and Document Studio. Read more on Lifehacker and YourStory

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