38% of webpages from 2013 have disappeared from the Internet

From PC World: We’ve probably all encountered the infamous 404 error message at some point during our browsing. Maybe you were looking for some old forum you used to hang out on or some other handy website, but came across a dead link. They say everything on the internet lasts forever, but new research from the Pew Research Center shows that’s not quite the case.

According to the research, 38 percent of web pages that existed in 2013 were inaccessible in October 2023. Nearly a quarter of all news articles on the web, 23 percent, contain at least one dead link, whether it’s a high or low-traffic site. In the case of US government websites, 21 percent of pages have at least one dead link.

Dead links are also evident on the internet’s own encyclopedia, Wikipedia. 54 percent of Wikipedia pages have at least one dead link in their reference lists.

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