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- title: Web Decay Graph
- url: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2015/05/25/URI-decay
- hash_url: b8dd4f6d72c7810d42bc733cbab7509e
-
- <p>I’ve been writ­ing this blog since 2003 and in that time have laid down, along with way
- over a mil­lion word­s, 12,373 hy­per­links. I’ve no­ticed that when
- some­thing leads me back to an old piece, the links are bro­ken dis­ap­point­ing­ly
- of­ten. So I made a lit­tle graph of their de­cay over the last 144 month­s.</p>
-
- <div><a href="https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2015/05/25/-big/decay.jpg.html"><img alt="URI decay at ongoing by Tim Bray" title="URI decay at ongoing by Tim Bray" src="https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2015/05/25/decay.png" /></a></div>
- <div><p>The “% Decay” val­ue for each val­ue of “Months Ago” is
- the per­cent­age of links <em>made in that month</em> that have de­cayed. For
- ex­am­ple, just over 5% of the links I made in the month 60 months be­fore May
- 2015, i.e. May 2010, have de­cayed.</p>
- </div>
- <p>Longer ti­tle ·
- “A broad-brush ap­prox­i­ma­tion of URI de­cay fo­cused on links se­lect­ed for
- blog­ging by a Web
- geek with a cam­er­a, com­put­ed us­ing a Ru­by script cooked up in 45
- minutes.”
- Mind you, the script took the best part of 24 hours to run, be­cause I was too
- lazy to make it run a hun­dred or so threads in par­al­lel.</p>
-
- <p>I sup­pose I could regress the hell out of the da­ta and get a pret­ti­er line
- but the sto­ry these num­bers are telling is clear enough.</p>
-
- <p>Another way to get a smoother curve would be for some­one at Google to
- throw a Map/Re­duce at a his­tor­i­cal dataset with hun­dreds of bil­lions of links.</p>
-
- <p>This is a very sad graph ·
- But to be hon­est I was ex­pect­ing worse.
- I won­der if, a hun­dred years af­ter I’m
- dead, the on­ly ones that re­main alive will be­gin with “en.wikipedia.org”?</p>
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