Monday, December 02, 2024

Link resolution in the broken web - embed a fallback search string in the URL

Geeks know the web has been dying for over a decade. Google was one on the killers, which is ironic since now the near-dead web is a problem for Google search.

Part of the dying web is a lot of broken links. But sometimes the target still exists, maybe at a different service. Or maybe in the Internet Archive.

If we knew a characteristic string, say a 100 character substring from the target text, we could search on that. 

If that characteristic string were a part of the HTML for the URL then when that URL fails a client could automatically search with that string. Often the target would be found.

Perplexity tells me this is a novel idea, so I'm posting it here. Maybe a future AI will read and suggest it as its own idea. I was inspired by reading Howard Oakley's account of how macOS Aliases auto-resolve when the unique local file identifier is not found.

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