Have you heard of "dead websites" before? It's about websites that stop working after a certain amount of time. What happens when these things die? Is there a place you can look for them? Does anyone keep track of how many websites go offline every day or every month? Which country or group actually has the largest number of websites? Is there a study that looks into why they died? There are more questions.
When I was surfing on a shortwave radio in the middle of the night, I got the idea for this dark part of the internet. I heard the words "Death and Dying on the Internet" on a German channel all of a sudden. The show was about to end. 'Tod und Sterben im Internet' means 'death and dying on internet'. It sounds so sad! But what does it mean in real life? I can't say anything better than what I found on the internet next:
"They're born, they grow, a few people love them, they say a few things, and then they die." Most of the time, the death of a website goes unnoticed and unrecognised. A dead website is no longer a good business, but it is a record of the past and a fiercely fought-over arena of time. A website that has died doesn't get a funeral, a farewell, or a eulogy. It often doesn't even get a last word. Websites seem to die in a strange way because they are both very public and very private organisms. They are made by a small group of people for a small group of people, and when they die, viewing them or thinking about them is inherently a solitary act. (Check out www.deckchairs.net/blogs/main/archives/000721.html)
You might think that the Google Robot, which "crawls" the Internet for information and sells it, would also know how to solve this interesting problem. Even though I looked for a week, I couldn't find an answer at Google or Google Lab.
On the other hand, I found that search engines don't like dead sites in general. One of their main goals is to show more real, updated sites in their search results. So, they don't like dead sites, dead links, and any other site that smells like death. They don't even like what we might call "exhausted" sites, which are ones that have been built but never changed or improved. These can also be seen as possibly dead or close to dead, so they are at the bottom of the list of search results.
Even if search engines don't care about them, that doesn't make them less important to the history of the internet or to the social and economic sciences. The questions at the top are important enough to study in detail. Still, it should be said that most people are still not interested in the topic. It's possible that this will happen soon.
In fact, the few details that can be found on the Internet already hint at what's to come. The site www.archive.org, for example, shows how many websites have changed over time. If you type a URL into their "waybackmachine," you might get screenshots from 1996 and later. It's interesting to see how the design of some sites that are very popular now has changed over time. Archive.org is connected to Alexa, so it only shows sites that Alexa "catches." Still, it is an extremely important and valuable addition to this field.
Another website called www.disobey.com has a section called "ghostsites" that has a list of dead websites. Some dead websites also have comments about how they grew and why they stopped working. The editor of the site, Mr. Steve Baldin, put his own ideas into the site and its list.
Of course, the smartest people also come first in this field. How to bring your site back to life is already written on a website. Like their business partners, they say they will bring life to a dead website. Your dead website will be at the top of search engine results in three months. On another website, you can learn how to use a dead website to your advantage. Imagine that website x was in the business of travel. You also have a website about travel and know that x is dead. So, find the websites that link back to x, tell the webmasters what happened, and tell them that your website could replace the dead x. Your site will have 10–20 percent more quality linkpartners in no time, the site says.
The social rule seems to be true here, too, which is sad. "For the one, it's his death, and for the other, it's his bread," as the Dutch say.
