I have been working on a project, and a part of it involves receiving a link from the user end. Currently, I am using a very rudimentary mechanism in terms of verifying the user input (all it does is check whether the input is a url or not). In an attempt to improve the security, I have been googling around to find solutions. Some of the solutions I came across involved checking the characters in the link, checking the links length, etc. I also came across some websites that have auto updating databases with known malicious websites. However, going through and comparing thousands of links would be very inefficient, and the first solution felt a bit spotty.