Over the years countless knowledge has been collected, this knowledge spans from knowledge about religions, cultures, science, and many more. After realizing that we needed a better way to store and access information the internet was created. Over the years there have been many advancements involving the internet making it better and more reliable. It became the global hub for information. With this people have become highly reliant on the internet to make it through their day-to-day life. With the internet holding all known information and being the basis for our lives now failing to properly keep track of information could be problematic. This is becoming a problem. Thousands of documents and reports are just vanishing from the internet, But why?
Originally people were confused because millions of research papers were disappearing. The problem appears to be an inability to keep up with the increasingly high amount of information being added to the database. Later it was determined that it was due to failed attempts to properly preserve the information. Meaning that this reported disappearance was nothing but human error when documenting their papers.
Back around 2013, the government pulled the plug on multiple websites across America. These links were directly connected to government documents both recent and archived. With this people very quickly noticed they disappeared and that any links pointing to the affected documents were erased from the internet. This has led people to buy some of these no longer functioning link connections and add messages like, “ Aren’t you glad you didn’t cite to this webpage … If you had, like Justice Alito did, the original content would have long since disappeared and someone else might have come along and purchased the domain to comment on the transience of linked information in the internet age.”
This occurrence is known as link rot, where when one thing on the internet is destroyed on the internet, anything linked to it will also be destroyed. While the effects of the deleted government documents are the most prominent account of this, it is seen very frequently. It has been recorded that about 66.5% of Links to Sites in the Last 9 Years have died. This might not seem bad but, it is seen that only 6% are rotted from 2018, 43% from 2008, and 72% recorded link rot from 1998. The connections within the internet are progressively getting worse and if we don’t find a solution for this the archive of the internet will become as efficient in storing knowledge as a waterlogged library from the 7th century. If this continues one new job will emerge and instead of cataloging information into the internet, you’ll be cataloging information from the internet into Giant, a couple of thousand page encyclopedias. If a solution is not found soon there will be no internet at all.
