With the advertisement-driven economy of the Web, popularity becomes the significant factor on many sites. The extremely popular sites served up by the likes of Yahoo!, Microsoft, Lycos, Amazon, and AOL are heavily visited, and boast in theirpress releases of their rising popularity rank or increased visitation. But what is the single most frequently seen page on the Web? Is it the home page for one of the major sites? Some days it seems to be the omnipresent "File not Found" page--the 404 error-message page. Many Web sites have their own customized version of this dead-link error message, which means that at least we get to see different "404 File not Found" pages. Note, however, that they are all generated because the Web server is returning the same error: the Web page you are looking for is justnot there. At times, this error is simply a result of a typo in the URL. While www.name.org/index.html may work just fine, www.name.org/indec.html will not. Likewise, www.neddevine.com is not the same as nedevine.com. It is certainly easy enough to mistype a URL. However, this does not equate to a dead link. In contrast, the 404 error messages that turn up from a link on another Web page, from a bookmark list, or from search-engine output, come from the death of a link. Dead links are littered throughout the Net. Sometimes the dead can be resurrected, found in a past life, or at least partially brought back to life. Understanding how links die and how 404 error messages can be managed on the Web server is also helpful for the information professional trying to track down the new home of a dead link. THE DEATH OF LINKS The interconnected, hypertext character of the Web contributes significantly to its importance. It allows for rapid changes to be made to files, easy connections between one site and another, and detailed intrasite navigational features. The Web encourages rapid, frequent, and direct publication of information.
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