As we move further into the 2020s, we will continue to see shorteners die. goo.gl (Google’s shortener) is already read-only. bit.ly may not last forever. Each time one dies, a wave of link rot crashes over the web.
This event triggered a cascade of "link rot." Millions of forum posts, academic citations, and social media references that used oobi.com links became dead ends. Clicking an OOBI link today leads to a 404 error or a generic domain landing page. The bridge between the short code and the destination was permanently burned. To understand the importance of the OOBI Internet Archive search, you must understand the gravity of link rot. A 2021 study by the Pew Research Center found that 38% of web pages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later. For URL shorteners, that number is closer to 70%. oobi internet archive
The only bulwark against this tide is the Internet Archive. If you have old OOBI links you need to recover, do not delay. The Archive’s storage is robust, but its ability to capture new redirects ended the day OOBI went offline. As we move further into the 2020s, we