The history is this: back in the old days (2012), we used to store the entire Compiler Explorer state in the URL. That got unwieldy (who would have thought encoding an entire compiler state in a URL might get a bit long?), so we added support for Google’s link shortener goo.gl in March 2014. That meant short links were of the form goo.gl/abc123. Clicking a goo.gl link would eventually redirect you to the full URL link on our site, and we’d decode the state from the URL. In 2016, Stack Overflow b...