Today is Black Friday in the United States.

Black Friday is the Friday after Thanksgiving and is traditionally the start of the Christmas holiday shopping season.

Almost all big retailers promote "early bird" sales on Black Friday. How does one learn where the best deals are located?

Well, either you buy a newspaper and look through the inserts — or — you use an Internet search engine.

We fully expect to see search engine optimization (SEO) attacks this year. Our Browsing Protection Portal can be used (for free) to determine the safety of unknown sites.

In addition to search engines, we also expect that sites such as Twitter will be used to promote special offers.

Common to Twitter and other such sites are short URLs (such as those provided by tinyurl.com and bit.ly) which are very convenient services but obscure the real URL source.

Is there a way to check the source of shortened URLs?

Yes. URLs can be expanded with longurl.org.

If you use Firefox, there's even an add-on available.



When installed, hovering over a short URL looks something like this:



And another example from Mikko's Twitter feed:



Handy.