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
Senior software engineer, dad, writer-thinker type. Big on learning something everyday and trying to have fun before the lights go out.
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