A recent study by the Pew Research Center revealed that the internet is gradually disappearing, with a significant portion of web pages and online content being lost over time.
Key Findings:
38% of webpages from 2013 are gone: This indicates a substantial loss of information and resources that were once available online.
8% of webpages from 2023 have disappeared: Even newer content is not immune to this phenomenon, raising concerns about the longevity of digital information.
Disappearance on functional websites: The study found that web pages are disappearing even on websites that are still active, not just when entire websites go offline.
Impact on news and reference content: This loss of content affects news articles, government websites, and even Wikipedia pages, where broken links are becoming increasingly common.
Social media content also affected: A fifth of tweets disappear within months of being posted, demonstrating that this issue extends beyond traditional web pages.
Methodology:
The study analyzed a random sample of nearly a million web pages from Common Crawl, an internet archive service, to determine their availability between 2013 and 2023.
Implications:
The disappearing internet raises concerns about the preservation of digital information and the reliability of online sources. It also highlights the need for more robust archiving efforts to ensure that valuable content is not lost forever.
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