spacer Coping with Error #404:
Web's broken links

reading glasses on open book pages

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Suffering from Link Rot?spacer
image of WayBackMachine site
Sounds like an old magazine ad, doesn't it? "Link rot" is the nickname for the common "404 Error" — Internet links to nonexisting pages. Pages are continually moved or deleted but their links are not always updated—thus rotted or broken links. Relax.

FINDING the page or site no longer exits, most users wince and consider it a lost cause. Not so at all. Since 1996, the Internet Archives has been scouring the Web every few months, archiving its pages, and storing them for free perusal at http://www.archive.org/index.php.
Image from WayBackMachine page


All you have to do is go to the WayBackMachine at the Archives, following these steps.

  1. Copy the url address (link) that is broken.
  2. Go to http://www.archive.org/index.php and look for the WayBackMachine.
  3. Paste your copied url/link into the Machine's address space, then click on "Take Me Back."
  4. Select which version of the page you want (it often gives you a choice of several years).

VOILA! You've accomplished what you thought was impossible.

If all of that isn't good news enough, try this: There are no ads or popup messages! The Archives is a 501 nonprofit institution that has archived 85 billion Web pages since 1996. Included in the collection is: software you thought was gone forever; moving images; texts; audios; and live music.

Right now it's one of the Internet's best kept secrets—but it won't be for long. As Alan November points out in his seminars: That MySpace page with you in the dirty toga or skimpy bikini when you were 18 years old—five years from now, when the Internet Archives site isn't such a secret, that page will be sitting there for a prospective employer to ponder. Oops.

Excerpted from The Read-Aloud Handbook (6th edition):

How common is “link rot”? According to two professors who did a 27-month study tracking 515 links to educational material on the web, one-third of them were dead in 2.25 months and half were dead in five years. [1] Are half the books in a library completely out of date in five years? Hardly. Internet "link rot" amounts to having half the exit ramps on American highways ceasing to exist in five years but no one told the map makers.

FOOTNOTE:

  1. J. Markwell and D.W. Brooks, "Broken links: The ephemeral nature of educational WWW hyperlinks," Journal of Science Education and Technology, 11, 2002, pp. 105-108; also: Markwell and D. W. Brooks, "'Link Rot' limits the usefulness of Web-based educational materials in biochemistry and molecular biology," Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education, 31, 2003, pp. 69-72, online: http://www-class.unl.edu/biochem/url/broken_links.html; also: Andrew Trotter, “Too Often, Educators’ Online Links Lead to Nowhere,” Education Week, December 4, 2002, pp. 1, 15.
 
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 To search this site, use the Google search engine to the left. You can also consult the Site Contents page. Occasionally Google reports older, out-of-date pages ("404 Error") which can usually be found using the Internet Archives (pasting the missing URL
into the "WayBackMachine" space).


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