[mid-kid]

What worries me the most about things like these is that it makes it seem like it's impossible to make "free for all" products like these anymore if you're not an established player already. You will get blacklisted and you will receive emails from your host telling you to shut it down...

Established players like bitly and tinyurl didn't have all the resources to deal with the problem when they started out either, and they arguably still don't, yet they get favored by the antivirus vendors and "safe"search blacklists, since they're well-known services. It doesn't seem fair.

Is this really the way it should be? I wonder if they could've explained the situation to the antivirus vendors: The site itself doesn't host malware and doesn't allow the discovery of said malware through its service. It requires a user to receive an exact URL, just like they could've received any other link, and the blocklists should operate on what's hidden behind it instead of the redirect in front. Maybe y.gy could've been hooked into the safesearch API to automatically nuke any URLs blacklisted already by them, or another antivirus vendor.