Is the Internet disappearing?

According to a report published by the British newspaper The Independent, many pages are being lost from the Internet, with sites being deleted or moved.

The report stated that the number of web pages on the Internet in general has declined by 38 percent compared to the pages that existed in 2013 and before.

The report also made clear that the matter is still ongoing, as it indicated that the number of currently existing web pages has decreased by 8 percent compared to the number of pages that existed in 2023.

The study conducted by the Pew Research Center indicated that many pages disappear when websites are updated on the Internet, in addition to a number of them disappearing if the site is completely deleted.

The study also stated that 54 percent of Wikipedia pages include a link in their references that no longer exists.

Almost the same effect occurs on social media, where a fifth of posts disappear from the site within months of being published.

According to the report, the study was completed by collecting random samples of nearly one million web pages, taken from Common Crawl, a service that archives parts of the Internet.

The researchers then looked to see if those pages continued to exist between 2013 and 2023.

It found that 25 percent of all pages collected between 2013 and 2023 are no longer available.

Of these pages, 16 percent were on websites that still exist on the Internet, while 9 percent were on websites that no longer exist at all. (Sky News)