The search engine giant, Google, has announced the launch of an all new service, Google URL Shortener, that significantly reduces the size of the URLs for Google Toolbar and Feedburner. The all new feature is called Google URL Shortener.

The shortening of URLs isn’t something new that has hit the internet, as the micro blogging sensation, Twitter is already working with shortened URLs. For all those of your who are regular tweeters, you may have noticed that, whenever you share a URL with the Twitter users, the entire long address of the specific web page gets chopped off and then displayed in very few characters, though retaining the crucial “http://” prefix to it. This particular feature works in tandem with Twitter’s 140 character limit for a post.

The idea behind the Google URL Shortener is to compress the URLs posted by users into fewer characters, thus making the lengthy URLs easily accessible and far more easy to post than before. The new service provides stable and reliable URL access to the users, especially in case of quite lengthy URLs. Furthermore, Google employs similar security protocols as in its search engine to the new service that, checks the URLs for malicious scripts and other threats, thus making the online experience of the users a more safe and enjoyable trip.

According to Google,

“Google URL shortener is not a stand-alone service; you can’t use it to shorten links directly. Currently, Google URL Shortener is only available from the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner. If the service proves useful, we may eventually make it available for a wider audience in the future.”

Via Mashable & Official Google Blog.