High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! URL shortening is a technique on the World Wide Web where a provider makes a web page available under a very short URL in addition to the original address. For example, the page can be shortened to Currently, web developers tend to pass descriptive attributes in the URL to represent data hierarchies, command structures, transaction paths and session information. This may result in a URL that is aesthetically unpleasant and difficult to remember. Copying a URL that is hundreds of characters long can make the URL garbled. Thus a short URL is more useful to copy from an e-mail message or forum post.