Designing a URL Shortener

Welcome! In this lesson, we'll design a URL shortening service, similar to Bitly or TinyURL. These services take a long, complex URL and convert it into a much shorter, more manageable one.

URL shorteners are incredibly useful for sharing links on social media, in emails, or anywhere space is limited. They also often provide analytics, tracking how many times a shortened link is clicked.

A URL shortener primarily performs two key functions:

• Shorten: Takes a long URL as input and generates a unique, short code. This code is then used to construct the short URL.
• Redirect: When a user accesses a short URL, the service looks up the corresponding long URL and redirects the user's browser to it.

These two operations form the backbone of the entire system.