Is there a way to find the service used to short a URL?

Question

I want to know if I can find the service behind a short URL.

For example smsng.co or g.co are short links used by Samsung and Google respectively, when you visit g.co you can know that it is a firebase url shortener URL, but I can't know it on Samsung URL, I can't know where it was made, if it is a Firebase URL, a tinyURL a bit.ly URL etc...

I want to find out who owns and operates the redirector service.

Is there a way to find that? As WHOIS is the way to find the owner of a domain.

PD: To clarify: What I want to know is if a short URL is a firebase Dynamic URL, I want to find the way to identify if a shortURL, for example youtu.be is made with Firebase.

Answer 1

as WHOIS is the way to find the owner of a domain

No. You actually have to make an HTTP request using the short link to find out where it finally redirects. Then, you can look up the owner of that domain. There is nothing in the string of a short link that gives you 100% confidence what is behind it.

Answer 2

No, there is no general way to programmatically establish the owner of a specific domain.

Whois is theoretically responsible for this, but it has several important issues which prevent it from being used effectively.

• Increasingly, many whois registrars offer anonymization services to protect the owners from spam, and possibly also to obscure ownership for legal and business reasons (including criminal ones, but not exclusively).
• Whois is not properly machine readable; each registrar has their own conventions and schemas for what information they publish and how it is structured. Many are very free-form.
• Prior to the existence of anonymization services, many registrants provided incorrect or completely bogus information. Because there is no pressure to keep the information up to date, many records are increasingly stale.
• Even when the information is correct, it is not provided and formatted consistently. A business name can be represented in many variations (Corp vs Corporation vs Corp International LLC vs Corp Ltd etc etc), or omitted entirely. Many organization have domains registered by an individual or unit which is only tangentially related to the organization; sometimes they obscure the relationship intentionally or unintentionally, other times they only list the name of the individual who registered the domain without any explicit affiliation with the actual owner organization.

There have been efforts to replace the legacy distributed whois database with something better, but the last round of technical discussions I witnessed was hijacked by domain brokers who basically wanted to sabotage any efforts to provide usability or transparency in the new system; my impression is that the initiative was abandoned yet again.

There are some heuristics you can look at for discovering the true owner of a domain. If you are lucky, some unique feature is shared by legitimate domains owned by a single entity, such as using the organization's well-published dedicated name servers. However, increasingly, these features too tend to be obscured, as more and more domains move their hosting to CDNs and cloud providers.

(As an example, examine the name servers for t.co and twitter.com. Both are currently served by twtrdns.net, whose name is reasonably transparent.)