As such, it often gets used by phishers to piggy-back on the domain reputation of Google by either human actors safety-squinting the domain name or systems that allowlist Google.

Google has often had open redirect problems, for example around AMP, but these seemed to be unintentional and were removed after some time. However, this google.com/url naming scheme almost seems intentional.

This is in contradiction with their own advice (2009) around open redirects [2].

Does anyone know why Google keeps this working, thereby facilitating phishers?

[1] https://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/scammers-using-new-trick-in-phishing-text-messages-google-redirects/

[2] https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2009/01/open-redirect-urls-is-your-site-being