Half my old bookmarks are dead and the survivors point somewhere else

Importing a very old bookmarks file

from Stardock Forums

I set my browser up properly again this year after a long time away, and imported an old bookmarks file while I was at it. Most of the links are dead, which I expected.

What I did not expect is how many of the survivors now land on a front page, or a login, or something that used to be a page and is now a feed. The address still resolves. What it pointed at is gone.

Nobody owes me a permanent URL, and link rot is hardly news. I just notice that I keep bookmarks out of habit now, and then search for the thing anyway.

internet
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Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top

I have gone the other way, I am afraid. My bookmarks are how I find anything at all, and I would be lost without them.

When I search for something I have read before, I am given a great many results and not one of them is the page I remember. What I am after is a few years old and everything offered to me is from this month. So I keep the bookmark, and on the occasions it still works it is exact, which searching never is.

The part you describe that I find genuinely unpleasant is the one that still opens. A dead link at least tells you. A link that lands on a front page has the look of having worked, and I have sat there a moment wondering whether I had misremembered the whole thing. That is a different sort of loss and I like it a good deal less than the plain kind.

My wife tells me I should stop bookmarking pages and start saving them, and I expect she is right.