2024-09-20: Some URLs Are Immortal, Most Are Ephemeral
This post reports preliminary results from the "Not Your Parents' Web" project, a collaboration between Old Dominion University's Web Science and Digital Libraries group , the Internet Archive (IA), and the Filecoin Foundation , with funding provided by the Filecoin Foundation. This work was performed by Kritika Garg (ODU PhD student), Sawood Alam (Internet Archive), Michele Weigle (ODU faculty), Michael Nelson (ODU faculty), and Dietrich Ayala (Filecoin Foundation). Our goal is to revisit the question, "How long does a webpage last?". The canonical response has been 44 , 75 , or 100 days, but that was based on research done in the early days of the Web (1996–2003). A study published in May 2024 from the Pew Research Center, "When Online Content Disappears" , found that 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer available on the live Web. A February 2024 study from the SEO company Ahrefs also considered the current status of links from 2...