Over the years, I’ve trundled through a bunch. Anyone remember the John Gotti Tribute Page? It’s apparently no longer maintained, and moved around a bit toward the end. Well, you can still summon bits and pieces of it off several different servers.
We’ve all come upon obviously dead pages (last updated October 16, 1996) with a counter showing 426 visitors. And I’ve seen a few news stories over the years to the effect that the top 20 search engines can only find about a third of the Web.
Having had a commercial site, I’m a little bit familiar with trying to get Yahoo to pick you up. And I imagine a lot of the proprietors of those freebie Geocities “Pictures of my sister’s baby” sites never even try to register (but get picked up anyway).
My own sites were deactivated by my order when I began shutting down my companies. I haven’t paid anything for them since last year. But they’re still there. I think my provider just forgot about’em and they’ll remain accessible until he has to make major changes.
So, how much of the 'net is just dead litter? Any forgotten nuggets to be found?
I tried to gind the Gotti pages a while ago … not so much for the tribute to the mobster, but rather for the Vegas travel chronicles of the woman that ran the site.
One lost nugget – a pro bonoredesign for the American Planning Association - New Mexico Chapter Web site, which never got implemented. Reload the index page and watch the scenery change!
Old, abandoned WWWBoard-based bulletin boards typically become collecting grounds for chain letters.
Since the capacity of the Internet for Web pages is almost by definition infinite (as long as people keep bringing new servers online), I suppose that means that there’s an infinite number of dead Web pages out there.
I read an estimate in some talky intellectual magazine a year or so ago that helpfully put the number at “billions and billions”.
