URL shortening is a technique on the World Wide Web in which a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) may be made substantially shorter in length and still direct to the required page. This is achieved by using a redirect on a domain name that is short, which links to the web page that has a long URL. For example, the URL "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_shortening" can be shortened to "http://tinyurl.com/urlwiki".