From Wiki: URL shortening is a technique on the World Wide Web in which a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) may be made substantially shorter and still direct to the required page. This is achieved by using a redirect which links to the web page that has a long URL. For example, the URL "https://example.com/assets/category_B/subcategory_C/Foo/" can be shortened to "https://snip.ml/Foo", and the URL "https://example.com/about/index.html" can be shortened to "https://snip.ml/h2iBY".
Often the redirect domain name is shorter than the original one. A friendly URL may be desired for messaging technologies that limit the number of characters in a message (for example SMS), for reducing the amount of typing required if the reader is copying a URL from a print source, for making it easier for a person to remember, or for the intention of a permalink. In November 2009, the shortened links of the URL shortening service Bitly were accessed 2.1 billion times.
From Wiki: In URL shortening, every long URL is associated with a unique key, which is the part after its top-level domain name. For example, https://snip.ml/AgnH4 has a key of AgnH4. Not all redirection is treated equally; the redirection instruction sent to a browser can contain in its header the HTTP status 301 (permanent redirect), 302, or 307 (temporary redirect).
There are several techniques to implement a URL shortening. Keys can be generated in base 36, assuming 26 letters and 10 numbers. In this case, each character in the sequence will be 0, 1, 2, ..., 9, a, b, c, ..., y, z. Alternatively, if uppercase and lowercase letters are differentiated, then each character can represent a single digit within a number of base 62 (26 + 26 + 10). In order to form the key, a hash function can be made, or a random number generated so that key sequence is not predictable. Or users may propose their own custom keys. For example, https://example.com/product?ref=01652&type=shirt can be shortened to https://snip.ml/example-shirt.
