A new study, conducted by the Pew Research Center, reveals that the Internet is effectively disappearing due to the loss of web pages and online content.
Although the web is thought to be a place where content lasts forever, large areas of it are lost as pages are deleted or moved, according to the study.
For example, 38% of web pages that existed in 2013 are now lost. Researchers report that newer pages are disappearing as well.
The study collected random samples of about one million web pages, taken from Common Crawl, a service that archives parts of the Internet, and then the researchers followed the continued existence of those pages between 2013 and 2023.
It found that 25% of all pages, collected between 2013 and 2023, are no longer available. Of these pages, 16% were from a website that still existed, while 9% were on websites that no longer existed at all.
These web pages tend to disappear when they are deleted or moved, meaning huge amounts of news and important reference content disappear.
The study showed that about 23% of news pages include at least one broken link, and 21% of government websites and 54% of Wikipedia pages include a link in their references that no longer exists.
Almost the same effect occurs on social media, where a fifth of tweets disappear from X within months of being published.
It highlights the need for better archiving to preserve valuable online content.
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