Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

I am not saying old content needs to be preserved forever, but so much content has factually been lost over time. Old logs from text-based MUDs for instance, even for MUDs that still exist today.

0.mk started in 2009 as a passion project built by three of us. We worked on it for a few hours each week around our regular jobs. We eventually closed it in 2014 because the revenue (hint: no revenue) could not cover hosting, development, and the constant work of fighting spam and reviewing abuse.

The recovered historical corpus contains 657,607 links. For this analysis, we followed every one of them.

Of the 655,178 links with safe, crawlable targets, 76.7% no longer returned a loading page. After removing repeated destinations, 78.7% of the 492,620 distinct crawlable URLs still did not load. So duplicate links are not creating the result.

I use “did not load” rather than “gone” deliberately. Some URLs returned 403 or 429 and may have blocked the crawler. Pages that returned 2xx or 3xx count as loading even when they now lead to parked domains, login walls, or removed-content notices.

There is one large distortion in the yearly data. A single account created 83,398 URLs pointing to one hostname in 2011. At URL level, 92.5% of that year did not load. Count each hostname once and the result becomes 61.7%, almost identical to 2010 and 2012.

A few things I did not expect:

- 835 restored links point at Facebook’s old photo CDN. None loaded. - The first link ever shortened was a CSS stylesheet on a WordPress blog. - Someone shortened localhost on the second day. - The longest stored URL is 38,753 characters and repeatedly says TRYING_THE_MAXIMUM_URL.

Most users came from one regional online community, so this is not a census of the whole web. It is a record of what that community shared between 2009 and 2014.

I brought 0.mk back to test whether AI can now handle enough development, spam filtering, abuse review, monitoring, and support to make the service sustainable where the original economics failed.

Happy to answer questions about the crawl, the old data, or the rebuild.