Internet is slowly disappearing according to a new study. Many older web pages and online content – but also some recent ones – no longer exist.
The Web is often seen as a place where content lasts forever. In some ways this is potentially the case. However, according to new research, many parts of the web end up forgotten not only by users but also in practice. Of the web pages that existed in 2013, for example, the 38% were lost. Even the most recent pages are disappearing: the8% of existing pages in 2023 are no longer available.
These pages tend to disappear especially following modifications, moves and/or removals that involve them in some way. This happens on otherwise functioning websites, as specified by the study Pew Research Center. This means that large amounts of news and important reference content are disappearing before our eyes. So many that it becomes really difficult to realize. Approximately 23% of news pages include at least one broken link, and 21% of affected websites are government websites. Finally, the 54%
of Wikipedia pages include a link in their references that no longer exists.
The Internet is starting to fail, or rather web pages: many sites have disappeared over the years
More or less the same phenomenon is also occurring on social platforms. A fifth of tweets about X, for example, disappear within a few months of posting. The study was completed by collecting random samples of nearly one million web pages, taken from Common Crawl, a service that archives parts of the Internet. The researchers then tried to see the evolution of some websites between 2013 and 2023. It emerged that 25% of the pages taken into consideration in the research – all dating between 2013 and 2023 – are no longer available. Of these, the 16% of the pages comes from a website that still exists, while the 9% It is found on websites that no longer exist.
