DeadURL.com is a free online service that quickly takes you from a broken link to a working alternative. It allows you to find exactly what you’re looking for with any broken link even links to websites that have been removed forever. It does this by finding backup locations for missing content, using Google Cache, the Internet Archive, and user submissions.
How You Benefit – You Save Time
One click can take you from a broken link’s error page to a working backup. With DeadURL.com, there no longer needs to be a struggle to find old or lost information. In many cases, it gives you nearly instant access to a backup of a url that would previously have been considered useless. Dead ends are blasted through. This speeds up your web browsing, shortening the time it takes to find information. Your productivity reaches a new level.
DeadURL.com works with any http:// url, even download links. If a file can no longer be downloaded from a site, an archived version may still be out there.
How This Is Possible
Any time a web page gets put online, there are usually a few copies that get made on other sites. Sometimes there are lots. These backups allow anyone to visit a page that used to be found at a currently broken url.
Two main sites that offer working backup copies for most web pages are Google, with their caching of web pages, and the Internet Archive. The Archive aims to keep copies of every web page not kept secret by its individual owner. That’s most web pages, and that allows to see and use old versions of any page, whether the current version works or not.
There are also mirror sites, which keep copies of individual pages and entire sites. There are lots of mirror sites out there built specifically to preserve certain sites and pages, and if you find a dead url for one of those places, a mirror site can provide the backup.
DeadURL.com gathers as many backup links as possible for each dead url, via Google cache, Archive.org, and user submissions. Every time a user previews a backup for a dead url, they influence that link’s score. The best backup links get the highest scores, and you can set your preference to automatically forward you from http://deadurl.com/SOME-DEAD-LINK to a preview of the best backup for that dead url, or straight to the best backup itself.
Ways To Use DeadURL.com
- There are lots of reasons for a url to be considered dead:
- The web site is down
- The web page was moved
- The url is a download link that doesn’t work
- The web page was updated, and is missing old content
- The site or page is blocked
- The domain name was misspelled
- The url was entered incorrectly in some other way
- The page is fake, pretending to be from a legitimate site
Any time you visit a page of backups at DeadURL.com, you can add your own helpful links to speed up future visits. If you reach a page where others have been, you may discover that someone has already added the perfect link to get you where you want to go.
Instructions
- Type deadurl.com/ to the left of the http:// in your address bar, and hit enter. This takes you to a list of current backup links for the error-producing web page.
- Click a backup link near the top of the list to preview it.
- If the preview looks good, click the green thumbs up to visit the backup page itself. If not, click the red thumbs down to find another backup link.
- Your choice of thumbs up or thumbs down influences the score for a backup link. Links with the best score appear at the top of the backups list, which is why the ones listed first are more likely to be helpful.
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