38% of the web pages that existed in 2013 have disappeared from the Internet today

May 20. (Portaltic/EP) –

The content that is available today on Internet It is not the same as it was ten years ago, since it disappears over time to the point that 38 percent of the pages that existed in 2013 have stopped doing so today.

On the Internet you can find billions of places where you can find information, buy, watch videos and share experiences, among other possibilities, but not everything that was once available always remains that way.

Content on the Internet is “fleeting”, as research by Pew Research Centerwhich has focused on the period between 2013 and 2023 to analyze, based on a sample from the Common Crawl web repository, the frequency with which online content that once existed becomes inaccessible.

Specifically, they have determined that 25 percent of all web pages that existed at some point in the period analyzed were no longer accessible as of October 2023, mainly because the page had been deleted. AND 38 percent of the content that existed in 2013 no longer exists today.

and this ““digital decay” is seen in different types of content and for different reasons. For example, the research identified that 21 percent of government site web pages have broken links, while 54 percent of Wikipedia entries contain at least one link in the ‘References’ section that leads nowhere.

The trend is also seen on social networks. Specifically, Pew Research Center analyzed the real-time publications of Twitter (now known as X).

From this monitoring, the ‘think thank’ concludes that almost one in five ‘tweets’ is no longer publicly visible just a few months after its publication, in 60 percent of cases because the account was made private, suspended, or deleted entirely. In the rest, the ‘tweet’ was deleted individually.

They also identified that there are some types of ‘tweets’ that “tend to disappear more frequently than others.” This is the case of those published in certain languages ​​(Turkish and Arabic), from profiles with the default profile image and from unverified accounts.

However, they also found that around 6 percent of tweets that disappeared later became available again. They link this temporary disappearance to changes in account privacy and the reestablishment of those that had been suspended.