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Where did the old web go? 76.7% links dead

Hacker News •
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An old 0.mk database backup held 657,958 links from 2009-2014. We restored 657,607 records and followed every destination in August 2026. Of 655,178 safe crawlable links, 76.7% no longer returned a loading page.

Most users were in Macedonia, so this is not a census of the entire web but a record of one community's shared links.\n\nThe survival test showed 51.24% could not connect, 25.44% returned HTTP errors, and only 23.32% loaded. Even that overstates survival, as many loaded pages are login walls, parked domains, or "no longer available" notices. The centralized web (YouTube, Wikipedia, Google) held up better than the small web of personal blogs, forums, and local news.

Many Macedonian news outlets that were linked have shut down.\n\nThe original team closed the service in 2014 due to spam and costs. Seventeen years later, AI made revival realistic by handling development, spam detection, and support. The links now run from edge machines in over 300 cities.