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Re: the quickly decaying web



I should have mentioned that the link I sent out earlier was to an extremely informal piece put
together by someone just demonstrating some of the interesting discoveries that can be made using
Google statistics.  It's not exactly a research report, but I still found it interesting.

For those interested in the speed at which pages get replaced on the Internet, there are many more
sources out there.  Just a few:

Broken Links: Just How Rapidly Do Science Education Hyperlinks Go Extinct?
http://www-class.unl.edu/biochem/url/broken_links.html

'Link Rot' Hampers Web's Usefulness In Education
http://www.unl.edu/pr/science/013002ascifi.html

Digital libraries and World Wide Web sites and page persistence.
http://informationr.net/ir/4-4/paper60.html

According the Internet Archive, "the average life of a Web page is only 77 days"
http://198.92.252.3/internet/faqs.html

How Much is Too Much? (from 1999)
http://www.pantos.org/atw/35654.html
Provides lots of numbers on linkrot, though it's obviously a bit old

Runaway Train: Problems of Permanence, Accessibility, and Stability in the Use of Web Sources in Law
Review Citations
http://www.aallnet.org/products/2002-02.pdf
Says that, after 4 years, only 30% of links to Web sources in law review articles still work.

Mad Library Disease: Holes in the Stacks by Michael Lesk (from 1996)
http://www.lesk.com/mlesk/ucla/ucla.html
says that the average URL "has a life of 44 days"

Regardless of what the exact numbers are, the basic phenomenon is pretty clear.  It is worth noting
that "link rot" numbers generally do not distinguish between pages that have been taken down
completely and those that have simply been moved to another URL.  The way (if at all) to address the
former issue is to capture preservation copies of the pages before they disappear, whereas the way to
address the latter issue is to use more persistent linking/naming approaches.   The flip side is that
link rot numbers can also sometimes miss URLs that persist but point to a document for which the
content has somehow changed over time.

=========================================================
 Cal Lee
 University of Michigan             Phone: 734-647-0505
 School of Information
 http://www-personal.si.umich.edu/~calz/
   "To the extent that archival organizations are concerned
    with current record practices and the content of future
    holdings, they cannot long delay plans for appraising,
    accessioning, and servicing this new [computer] media
    of communication."
                                  - Meyer Fishbein, 1970

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