Data from Feb. 21, 2000

Significant Improvement!
As compared to the Nov. 1999 Dead Link Report, most of the search engines have shown considerable improvement in the number of dead links in their databases. AltaVista now ranks the worst.

Based on an analysis using the first 100 hits from three searches, this table shows the percentage of dead links among those 300 records. The dead links percentage columns includes the 404 file not found error message, 401 access denied and 403 forbidden errors, and various connection errors. These connection errors include No connect, Host not found, and Timed out. The third column shows the percentage of dead links that resulted only from the the 404 file not found error message, 401 access denied, and 403 forbidden errors excluding all the connection errors (host not found, no connect, timeout after several minutes) which may represent only temporarily dead links.

The February analysis used three terms: crumpet, polyphenol, and topography. This analysis has some markedly different results when compared to the previous dead link reports (listed below) that used the same methodology. This provides another example of how the search engine databases are constantly changing.

See also earlier dead link reports.

• Nov. 1999 Dead Link Report
• Sept. 1999 Dead Link Report
• May 1999 Dead Link Report
• March 1999 Dead Link Report
• Jan. 1999 Dead Link Report

See also the following statistical analyses:

• Relative Size of the search engines
• Total Size Estimate
• Overlap between the search engines
• Unique Hits hits from each
• Change Over Time