I've never worked at a company that uses go links so I have to ask - what problem do these solve? Every URL I visit frequently automatically shows up in auto complete suggestions in my browser.
A huge one is documentation linking. By having the indirection in one place you don’t have to swap all the various places that might be linked to something, you just switch the go link.
This is especially valuable when switching cms/erp/ticket systems etc where you may not have a lot of ability to manipulate generated links.
Typing go/wiki is faster than typing "wiki" in my search bar and hitting the down arrow 5 times for the correct autocomplete answer. I found the bigger (unexpected) value of something like this to be that when I don't know what I want, someone else is likely to have defined it already. E.g. go/401k at my employer takes me right to the wiki page about our 401k plan with a link to our provider prominently at the top. Nobody told me this existed, I simply needed info about our 401k plan and assumed someone, at some point, would have created it. Sure, I could bookmark it or something, but simply typing go/401k "just works" for me. It's also really nice for new hires who don't have some super robust autocomplete history already built up.
One thing I miss from fburl (Facebook's go-links) is that pretty much EVERY internal system had built-in support for creating them.
A perfect example would be the Scuba and OBS observability UIs. Instead of sharing a gnarly 500-character URL in chat to point someone to a specific query, you click "generate fburl" and get a short link.
More and more commercial/open-source software has built-in support for creating their own short links these days (Grafana and Kibana both do), but having it be ubiquitous -- and easy to integrate into new tools -- was really nice.
Was at FB for many years, and I so miss this, getting an fburl from almost anywhere I am and quickly being able to send that over to someone.
Now whenever I try to share some link (eg a Datadog dashboard link), I have to send over humongous urls over slack / wherever.
Take documents for example. You can have go/feature1-design-doc that points to a Google doc with the design discussion for feature 1.
No need to find it on Google Drive (where the title may or may not follow consistent patterns) or remember which of the many Google doc links in autocomplete is the correct one.
It's really nice if you have a big company with many centralized systems. For example, if you want to book PTO but you don't know the specific link, you can just do go/pto or go/vacation and it will probably work.
