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Old Webring Hubs Beat Google Search for Finding Dead Sites
Everyone says the Wayback Machine is the holy grail for hunting old sites, but I found way more forgotten pages through a busted GeoCities webring hub from 1999 than I ever did through any archive search. The ring's homepage had 47 member links, and 11 of them still load today, including a guy's personal page about his pet ferrets that hasn't been touched since 2004. Anyone else still poking through webrings instead of archives, or am I the only one doing it backwards?
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hernandez.jordan5d ago
47 member links is wild, I remember reading somewhere that at the peak of GeoCities there were something like 30,000 active webrings, and most of those hub pages are just gone now. That part about the ferret guy is great, those untouched pages are time capsules. I've had luck with ring hubs where the owner kept a plain text list of members, no images, so even when the graphics broke the links survived. The trick is the ring sites that copied the list across to a new host every few years, some of those are still up. Archives only grab what someone fed them, but a webring was a real network, so the links point to places crawlers never even sniffed.
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