url shortening and clean urls

[eluser]rickyracoon[/eluser]
I get the point about using the numeric id to look up the articles, but its an auto-increment field and I don't like the underlying id exposed. Also, I hate that the text in the segment following the id is arbitrary - makes me worry about duplicate content in SEO. For example:

http://yoursite.com/article/123/real-article-title

would be the same as if someone linked to it using:

http://yoursite.com/article/123/doesnt-m...-goes-here

To prevent the title part of the URL from being invalid I'd have to lookup the DB anyway, which is why I figured I might as well drop the id altogether. Any thoughts on that?

Also, thanks for the bitly API - but I'm afraid the customer wants the site to act as their own internal URL shortener (intranet site) so I still don't understand how I can differentiate between the "short url hash" and other controller names. Is there a certain reg expression that might work with routes? Or is there a way for to do routing after all controller names are checked for?