The Internet is disappearing as web pages and online content are lost, a new study suggests.
The web is often thought of as a place where content lasts forever. But large parts of it are lost as pages are deleted or moved, according to new research, writes The Independent.
Of the web pages that existed in 2013, for example, 38% are now lost. Even newer pages are disappearing: 8% of pages that existed in 2023 are no longer available.
These pages tend to disappear when deleted or moved. According to the study by the Pew Research Center, this happens more with functioning websites than when entire websites disappear.
The effect is that large amounts of news and important reference content disappear. According to the study, about 23% of news pages include at least one broken link, and 21% of government websites and 54% of Wikipedia pages include in their references a link that no longer exists.
The same effect occurs in social media. A fifth of tweets disappear from the site a few months after being posted.
The study was conducted by collecting a random sample of nearly one million web pages, taken from Common Crawl, a service that archives parts of the Internet. The researchers then looked to see if those pages continued to exist between 2013 and 2023.
It found that 25% of all pages collected between 2013 and 2023 were no longer available. Of these, 16 percent of the pages came from a website that continued to exist, while 9 percent were from websites that no longer existed at all.
