How to get around broken links [Note: I know some of you saw this post 5 times in your RSS aggregators. Sorry about that. Had some problems with the net connection. Pressed publish a few too many times.]

It was brought to my notice recently (sad, sad start to a blog entry). One of the links in one of my previous posts ("posts" is a bit of a stretch. There are two.) is dead. I'm sure it's happened to you, before. So, how can you get around it?

I can think of a couple of things off the cuff (side note: I don't wear things which have cuffs):

• Search for it, using any search engine.


• Use the Wayback Machine

Ironically, in this case, the broken link, is not that easy to find using either technique. Giving that link to the Wayback machine returns one page, with a lot of broken image links. You can get to the actual pages by getting those links and giving them to the Wayback machine. But, that's too much trouble.

Giving that link to Google or Yahoo turns up almost nothing (even using "site:"). So, I'm left with no option but to use the fact that I know the title of the page I'm looking for (the secret diaries and tolkien). So, a Google search for the secret diaries tolkien gives the page I'm looking for. It's here.

Any other ideas?

Arvind

PS: Searching for old stuff? Go to archive.org.  ¶ 7:02 pm 7 comments