How the Wayback Machine is trying to solve the web’s growing linkrot problem

We’ve been talking a lot about the future of the web on Decoder and across The Verge lately, and one big problem keeps coming up: huge chunks of the web keep going offline. In a lot of meaningful ways, large portions of the web are dying. Servers go offline, software upgrades break links and pages, and companies go out of business — the web isn’t static, and that means sometimes parts of it simply vanish.

It’s not just the “really old” internet from the ’90s or early 2000s that’s at risk. A recent study from the Pew Research Center found that 38 percent of all links from 2013 are no longer accessible. That’s more than a third of the collected media, knowledge, and online culture from just a decade ago — gone. Pew calls it “digital…

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