Internet Archive wants to get rid of link rot

You know that thing where you're reading something interesting but then you see a super interesting link and you're like, yeah, I'm gonna click the shit out of this, and then you do, and your computer fritzes, blinks at you, and then you get a 404 error?

Internet Archive has built a tool to make that stop happening.

Internet Archive has long chronicled deceased web pages with the Wayback Machine, allowing users to access stuff that is no longer readily available. But, of course, users would have to know about the Wayback Machine and how to use it.

Now Internet Archive has built a Wayback Machine Chrome extension. It works like this: If you click on a link that would normally lead to an error page (think 404), the extension will instead give users the option to load an archived version of the page. The link is no longer simply gone.

"By using the “Wayback Machine” extension for Chrome, users are automatically offered the opportunity to view archived pages whenever any one of several error conditions, including code 404, or 'page not found,' are encountered," the folks at Internet Archive wrote in a blog post announcing the extension. "If those codes are detected, the Wayback Machine extension silently queries the Wayback Machine, in real-time, to see if an archived version is available."

The extension will surely mitigate some internet user annoyance, and it will serve a significant practical function. According to a 2013 study out of Harvard, nearly half the links mentioned in decisions made by the United States Supreme Court no longer function. This means researchers and citizens will have a more difficult time discovering the evidence and arguments on which these decisions were based, and the percentage of broken links is only going to grow. With this extension, many of those links would be restored.

You can try it out here.