On the web, links should connect to something. But as companies are regularly updating their web pages, the structure of the website including its links, can often change. This will result the dreaded error page when visiting a "dead link."
One of the way to find missing pages is to use the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Operating since the 1996, the service has made snapshots of web pages, allowing people to go back in time and look at them.
The Wayback Machine is like the time machine of the internet.
And to make things easier for those that stumble to "link rots", error pages or dead pages such as the 404s, Wayback Machine is launching a Google Chrome extension on January 13th, 2017 to allow Chrome users to go back in time without changing tabs.
When the extension is downloaded and installed to Chrome, the extension will check if there is an archive version of the page whenever a user sees an error page. If the Wayback Machine has an archived version of the said page, the user will see a notice offering the option to visit the archived copy.
The attempt by the Wayback Machine isn't at all the first. Over the course of the internet, there have been many unofficial efforts to build something to negate the dreaded 404 error. But with the Wayback Machine taking the matter into its own hands, the service that is seen to have the most archived web contents, can certainly do more to show.
With the internet growing with the many websites online and active, nothing can be done to stop the growth of link rot. But as Mark Graham, co-founder of the Internet Archive, noted, the extension will help temper its effects.
"The Wayback Machine Chrome extension is designed to help mitigate link rot and other common web breakdowns."
The Wayback Machine itself, is having more than 15-petabyte of data consisting of 273 billion webpages taken from over 361 million websites. And by releasing its own extension, it can certainly make experience on the web better, especially when the extension will detect not just 404s, but also 408, 410, 451, 500, 502, 503, 504, 509, 520, 521, 523, 524, 525, and 526.