Well, so long and thanks for all the fish. A study from the Pew Research Center entitled “When Online Content Disappears” indicates that our beloved internet may well be disappearing beneath our fingers—with a quarter of all webpages that existed between 2013 and 2023 found to be no longer accessible.
Contrary to the popular perception that everything committed to the interwebs is destined to exist forever, the study revealed that 38% of pages that existed in 2013 alone have now been lost (via The Independent). It doesn’t appear to be an age-related phenomenon, either.
Even newer pages appear to be performing vanishing acts—eight percent of pages that existed in 2023 were found to be unavailable, too.
The study made use of Common Crawl, an open reposi…