Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out. | 0.mk<br>← Back to blogJuly 25, 2026 · Updated August 11, 2026<br>Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out.<br>An old 0.mk database backup held 657,958 links created between 2009 and 2014, along with their click counts. We restored 657,607 of those records as pre-2015 links and followed every destination in August 2026. Of 655,178 safe, crawlable link records, 76.7% no longer returned a loading page.<br>Most 0.mk users were in Macedonia, so this is not a census of the entire web. It is a large surviving record of what one online community shared during that period, including local news, personal blogs, photo hosts, forums, and the major platforms of the time.<br>When 0.mk started in 2009, it was a passion project built by a team of three. We worked on it when we could, usually for a few hours a week around our regular jobs. Seventeen years later, one of us found an old database backup on a disk and decided to bring it back.<br>Here is what those six years of link creation look like, with the long silence after them:<br>2009: 3,668 links20094k2010: 20,283 links201020k2011: 103,053 links2011103k2012: 23,148 links201223k2013: 224,931 links2013225k2014: 282,524 links2014283k2026: 404 links2026404Raw link records, not users. The 2011 spike includes one 83,398-link batch; 97.8% of 2013 records and 99.9% of 2014 records are not attached to a recovered account. The green sliver is the 2026 relaunch.<br>The survival test<br>The crawl covers all 657,607 restored link records dated through December 2014. We excluded 2,429 records whose targets were malformed, internal, credentialed, or policy-blocked, leaving 655,178 crawlable historical links:<br>Could not connect: 51.24%HTTP error: 25.44%Loaded: 23.32%<br>51.24% could not connect (DNS, timeout, TLS)25.44% http error (4xx / 5xx)23.32% loaded (2xx / 3xx response)<br>Even that 23.3% overstates how much survived. A login wall, a parked domain full of ads, or a "this content is no longer available" notice all count as loading. A working page does not mean the original content is still there.<br>Why 657,607 links but 494,781 URLs? Multiple short links sometimes point to the exact same destination. There are 162,826 such repeat records. Counting each destination once leaves 494,781 distinct URLs, of which 492,620 were crawlable. Only 21.3% of those loaded. The percentage barely moves when repeated destinations are removed: 78.7% still did not load.<br>At the unique-URL level, 55.0% failed at the network layer after retrying uncertain results from a second network, and 23.7% returned an HTTP error. The most common HTTP result was 404, across 76,403 distinct URLs. Another 29,663 returned 403 or 429; those pages did not load for the crawler, but may be blocking automated requests rather than missing. A 403 or 429 can mean the site blocked our crawler, so "did not load" is more honest than saying every one of those pages is gone.<br>The same pattern appears at the domain level. Of 133,605 crawlable hostnames, only 34,827 had even one URL load. The other 98,778 had none.<br>2009URLs

64.58%<br>Hosts

61.53%

2010URLs

60.39%<br>Hosts

60.36%

2011URLs

92.53%<br>Hosts

61.74%

2012URLs

59.43%<br>Hosts

62.46%

2013URLs

75.06%<br>Hosts

75.24%

2014URLs

78.16%<br>Hosts

75.45%

Share with no loading page in the complete crawl. URL-level results count every distinct path; host-level results count each hostname once.<br>The 2011 split explains the strange annual totals. One account created 83,398 distinct links to pelaphptutorials.com. At URL level, 92.5% of 2011 destinations did not load. Count that host once and the figure is 61.7%, almost identical to 2010 and 2012.<br>The annual totals do not show a collapse in ordinary usage during 2012. Remove that one batch and 2011 falls from 103,053 records to 19,655; 2012 had 23,148. Almost all records from 2013 and 2014 are anonymous in the recovered data, and three quarters of their hostnames have no loading URL. Raw link volume is not a user-growth curve.<br>Many of the recognizable survivors are giants: YouTube, Wikipedia, and Google properties. Personal blogs, forums, local news sites, and photo hosts appear throughout the unavailable set. The centralized web has generally held up better than the small web.<br>A walk through the graveyard<br>The database reads like a museum of the 2010s internet. Some residents, with the number of links pointing at them:<br>Facebook photo CDN (fbcdn.net), none loaded835 links

Google Code, now redirects many URLs to its archive803 links

PureVolume, the old service is gone but its domain responds796 links

Rapidshare, no URL loaded139 links

Megaupload, no URL loaded71 links

Picasa Web Albums, no URL loaded69 links

People shared Facebook photos as direct CDN links; none of the 789 distinct fbcdn.net URLs behind those 835 records loaded. Yet PureVolume now returns pages for 633 of 653 distinct URLs, and Google Code loads or redirects 628 of 754. The original services are gone, but their...