Do you still remember the last time you needed to consult an encyclopedia to clarify a question? As the Internet gained more and more weight in our lives, we began to have information at our fingertips and the production of knowledge moved to the digital world to take advantage of online distribution channels.
But how many times have you found yourself browsing in search of important information and, when clicking on a link you want to consult, you are suddenly taken to a page that no longer exists? This phenomenon, called link rot (or deterioration of connections, in a free translation into Portuguese), demonstrates how 'fragile' the Internet can be and new data raises more concerns.
25% of web pages created between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, because an individual page has been deleted or removed from a once-functional website. This is one of the main conclusions of one of the most recent studies published by the North American Pew Research Center.
The trend is even more egregious when looking at older online content. The data indicates that close to 38% of the pages that existed in 2013 are no longer available today. By contrast, only 8% of pages that existed in 2023 are no longer available.
The team of researchers who carried out this study explains that digital deterioration occurs in multiple online spaces: from links on government and news websites to reference sections on Wikipedia pages.
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According to the analysis, 23% of news pages and 21% of government website pages contained at least one 'broken' (i.e. non-functional) link. Already 54% of Wikipedia pages contained at least one link in their references section that took users to a page that no longer exists.
But that's not all: when analyzing an extensive set of publications on the social network X (formerly Twitter), following them over three months, the researchers found that almost one in every five tweets was no longer publicly available.
In 60% of cases, the accounts that made the posts became private, were suspended or deleted. In the remaining 40%, the publications were deleted by those who made them, although the accounts remained active.
The research that has been carried out in this area helps not only to understand the scale of the problem, but also the differences that exist between different types of online content. For example, a study published in 2021 by a team of researchers from Harvard Law School, which analyzed around two million external links in articles on The New York Times website since its creation in 1996, revealed that 25% of links to specific content were not available.
The probability of a link not working increases with the 'age' of the articles. According to the data, 72% of connections dating back to 1998 were not functional. Furthermore, 53% of all articles analyzed with links to specific content had at least one that was not possible to access.
Some researchers who participated in this study had already demonstrated in 2014 that half of the connections found in judicial opinions from the United States Supreme Court since 1996 no longer worked. This study, which also analyzed the condition of links used in academic articles published in the Harvard Law Review, found that 75% of these links were deteriorated.
On social media, an article published in 2012, regarding the second international conference on theories and practices in digital libraries, reported that, on the most popular platforms, 11% of publications were lost and 20% archived within a year. On average, 27% were lost and 41% archived after two and a half years.
Trying to mitigate a problem of this size is not an easy task. However, there are projects that want to make a difference, such as digital preservation initiatives. One of the best known is the Internet Archive with its WayBack Machine, which, to date, has an extensive archive with 835 billion web pages.
The International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) brings together entities from around the world that collaborate to preserve online content. These projects play a key role in ensuring that knowledge, especially that which only exists in digital format, remains alive.
Link rot (deterioration of links) is not a new phenomenon, but as the Internet evolves, it silently proliferates, putting at risk all online information and knowledge that is not properly preserved. Solving this problem is not easy, but there are initiatives that are focusing on digital preservation as a way to mitigate it.
