Broken Links No More?

johndoejersey writes "Students in England have developed a tool which could bring the end to broken links. Peridot, developed by UK intern students at IBM scans company weblinks and replaces outdated information with other relevant documents and links. IBM have already filed 2 patents for the project. The students said Peridot could protect companies by spotting links to sites that have been removed, or which point to wholly unsuitable content. 'Peridot could lead to a world where there are no more broken links,' James Bell, computer science student at the University of Warwick, told BBC News Online. Here is another story on it." See also the BBC story.

Comments

Not Entirely New

[terrencefw]

I've seen lots of site that return search results based on bits of the broken link instead of 404's.

Suppose you have broken link http://somesite.com/foo/bar.html, some sites return a list of search results from within 'somesite.com' matching 'foo' or 'bar'. Quite clever, and much more useful than a plain old 'page not found' error.

This just takes that one step further by doing the searching at the referring end instad.

Re:Great

[tannnk]

Hey... We had this kind of features on internet before

German readers...

[dukoids]

may want to take a look at the master's thesis of Nils Malzahn (from 2003, in German) to see (in detail) how this actually can work:

http://www-ai.cs.uni-dortmund.de/DOKUMENTE/malzahn _2003a.pdf

Basically, the thesis evaluates different methods to build a kind of "finger-print" of a page. The finger print is used to find the page with google if it is gone, or has changed significantly.

The internet wayback machine was used to learn distinguishing disappeared pages from pages changing slightly over the time.

Re:And... ?

[pipingguy]

It wouldn't take long to write a script to find all the broken links on a page.

Just use Xenu's Link Checker.

Instead

[Dr. Stavros]

Just use the W3C's link-checker.

Re:What if the page is deleted, not changed

[troon]

That's what the 410 Gone HTTP response header is for. If only admins would use it more...

been there, done that.

[Quickening]

For those running a real browser, just make this a link, preferably in your personal tool bar.

javascript:Qr=document.URL;if(Qr=='about:blank') {v oid(Qr=prompt('Url...',''))};if(Qr)location.href=' http://web.archive.org/web/*/'+escape(Qr)

Now when I click on a link that isn't there, I select my Archive search button and it shows me the Wayback Machine's history of that link. Of course it works only if the url hasn't been modified by the server. If it has it's another couple steps (copy link, ^T, archive search, paste url in pop-up dialog)