Nick Ang profile picture

Nick Ang

How URL shorteners generate 3 trillion unique URLs with just 7 characters

How do URL shorteners support 3.5 trillion unique URLs with just 7 characters?

Turns out, it’s by expanding the way we count, from 0-10 to 0-62!

(Correction: I said 9 characters in the video, but 0-9 has 10 characters. The big numbers must be mushing my brain.)

the solution is to count in base62

I referred to this article to learn about this.


Nick Ang profile picture
Husband, dad, and software engineer that writes. Big on learning something everyday and trying to have fun before the lights go out.
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