pages

More than a third of webpages have disappeared in the past 10 years according to a new study. Eight percent of pages that existed last year have already gone. The figures come from the Pew Research Center, exploring what it calls "digital decay" and ... other sources have called "link rot". (Source: pewresearch.org ) Pew's researchers looked at a random selection of URLs which were active at various points over the past 10 years. On average, a quarter have now gone. Naturally there's a downward trend, with 38 percent of pages active in 2013 now unavailable. Even with pages active as recently as ... (view more)

Microsoft looks set to reverse a controversial change to Windows 11 settings. The move will make it easier to change the default browser away from Microsoft Edge. Before Windows 10, browsers could easily set themselves as the default, meaning they ... would automatically open any web pages or links. While that was meant to work only where the user had given permission, Microsoft concluded there was too much risk of rogue software setting itself to open web links, in turn letting it display bogus pages designed to install malware or trick users into providing login details. With Windows 10, ... (view more)

The Chrome browser is getting a couple of new features that some may find useful. Sharing links and finding previous pages could both get easier. The first feature is already available in Chrome 90, the latest version of the browser for the general ... public. It works on computers, though won't appear on the iOS and Android apps till later. The feature simply lets users create a link that points to a specific location on a page, rather than just containing the URL. The idea is to make is easier to share a link to something specific in a lengthy page. This isn't the same as internal text links ( ... (view more)

Google has inadvertently revealed the names of rape victims whose identity is legally secret. It's all down to over-enthusiastic behavior by the search engine's "autocomplete" feature. Autocomplete works when a user starts typing a term into the ... Google search bar, then the search bar presents a drop-down menu with suggested terms based on what is being typed in. The user can then click or tap on any of these terms to carry out the search without having to type out the search query in full. As they continue typing more characters, the list of suggested terms will update to become ... (view more)

Google has removed more than a million web pages from its search index under European privacy guidelines. It's published detailed statistics on its handling of the "right to be forgotten." The "right" is actually a set of legal guidelines ... established by the European Court of Justice and covering searches made within Europe. The idea is to balance the right to privacy with the right to freedom of expression. It was sparked by a case where a man complained that searches for his name brought up a 1998 newspaper article about his house being foreclosed over a debt. Although the article was untrue ... (view more)

Facebook says it will no longer accept advertisements that link to "low-quality" web pages. It's also going to reduce the likelihood that people see user-posted links to such pages. The system Facebook uses for identifying such pages will be ... automated but is based on guidelines developed from manually reviewing "hundreds of thousands" of pages that Facebook had linked to. After staff decided which of these sites were low quality, its computers looked through those pages to spot patterns of common characteristics. (Source: fb.com ) Toenail Fungus Unwelcome Facebook isn ... (view more)

An attempt to prevent the piracy of Warner Brothers movies has backfired, with several Warner Brothers official pages being reported in violation to Google. It appears to be an overzealous campaign by an agency hired to protect the company's ... copyright. The TorrentFreak site noticed the blunder while looking through a database of filings made to Google to report alleged breaches of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Such reports are designed to persuade Google to remove copyright-infringing sites from its search index. (Source: torrentfreak.com ) This doesn't remove the page ... (view more)

British news agency BBC has published a list of its articles which are no longer linked to through Google, due to a controversial European law. The move means that the people who requested the pages be removed may have actually made things worse. ... The situation involves the " right to be forgotten ", a policy introduced last year by the European Court of Justice . It rules on those laws that apply across the 26 countries that are part of the European Union. The policy applies in cases where people want pages with embarrassing, outdated or privacy-threatening information about them ... (view more)

Google has revealed that it rejects the majority of complaints it gets from users asking for embarrassing or false content to be removed from its search results. It seems to be getting most decisions "right," but there's still concern about the ... process. The issue involves a ruling by the European Union of Justice, which handles those laws that apply across 28 countries in Europe. It affects any search engine that offers results to European users, even if the search engine or the sites it lists are based elsewhere. The "right to be forgotten" ruling involves cases where ... (view more)