Fixing Broken Links With the Internet Archive

eggboard writes "The Internet Archive has copies of Web pages corresponding to 378 billion URLs. It's working on several efforts, some of them quite recent, to help deter or assist with link rot, when links go bad. Through an API for developers, WordPress integration, a Chrome plug-in, and a JavaScript lookup, the Archive hopes to help people find at least the most recent copy of a missing or deleted page. More ambitiously, they instantly cache any link added to Wikipedia, and want to become integrated into browsers as a fallback rather than showing a 404 page."

Comments

Re:No. 404 is important!

[bill_mcgonigle]

Chillax, dude, it's simply a matter of implementation and preferences.

While archive.org might think this is a new idea, I've been using Errorzilla mod for the good part of a decade. When a 404 is encountered, you get the regular error page, and then it adds some buttons that let you look at the Google cache, Coral cache, Wayback archive, etc.

Quite useful and non-harmful.