More website links are expiring. Is it a bug or a feature of the internet?
Marketplace Tech
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 11 July 2024
⏱️ 10 minutes
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Summary
The internet is full of all manner of unsavoriness that is surely corroding our minds and societies. But the kind of rot we’re talking about here is link rot — the disappearance of online content when links turn into “404 Page Not Found.” A recent study from Pew Research suggests almost 40% of all webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible. That includes important government links, citations on Wikipedia and hyperlinks in news articles. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali recently talked about this with Clare Stanton, product and research manager at Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab, who also works on a webpage preservation project, perma.cc.
Transcript
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| 0:36.0 | The internet is rotting and not just how you think. From American public media |
| 0:41.0 | this is marketplace tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino. |
| 0:44.0 | Yes, the internet is full of all manner of unsavariness that is surely |
| 0:58.2 | corroding our minds and societies, but the kind of rot we're talking about |
| 1:02.3 | today is link rot that is the disappearance of online content |
| 1:07.4 | links that turn into 404 page not found a recent study from from Pew Research showed almost 40% of all web pages |
| 1:16.4 | that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible. That includes important |
| 1:21.9 | government links, citations on Wikipedia, and hyperlinks and news articles. |
| 1:27.0 | My marketplace colleague Lily Jamale recently talked about this with Claire Stanton, |
| 1:32.0 | product and research manager at Harvard Law School's Library Innovation Lab, |
| 1:36.0 | who also works on a webpage preservation project called Perma C.C. Here's that conversation. |
| 1:42.0 | So what are the major reasons for when the link rots as you say? |
| 1:47.0 | Well, there's a lot of reasons for it. |
| 1:49.0 | People stop paying for the domains or people kind of intentionally take content down because they're trying to hide it but we at Perma C.C. which is a |
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