No More Broken Links?
from the who-needs-'em? dept
Some student interns at IBM have apparently come up with a system for discovering and fixing broken links. While systems that check links and alert you if they’ve changed have been around for a while (with varying degrees of usefulness), this one also tries to figure out where the existing page moved to or if it can find an equivalent page of information — and makes the change automatically (sometimes first asking for permission). What might be interesting is if they hooked this system up to the Web Archive. While it looks targeted at intranet usage, it would be great for the rest of the web as well. Imagine that as soon as a page goes down, the system either finds the same version elsewhere on that site, or shifts the link to the Web Archive version.
Comments on “No More Broken Links?”
Google?
Now it’s starting to make sense. We’ve read about the rumored Google browser – what if they are having the same thoughts? No more linkrot – broken links could either go to Google’s cached page or if it doesn’t exist, maybe a search results page? Now that’s a browser I would run.