A website, consisting of two user interface pages, a crawler, and a database.

Main service (Page 1): Users can enter URLs that no longer work. For a small number of them, the website presents one or more suggestions for replacement URLs, maybe with comments. (This functionality could be exported as a machine-accessible service as well.)

These replacement URLs are found by two means: automatically and manually.

Automatically (Crawler + Database): A search engine that notices when different places (e.g., blogs) refer to the same URL at one point in time, and when, at a later time, some of those references have changed. (The surrounding text is still the same, but the URL has changed). If the search engine detects such a case, the second URL is a potential replacement for the first.

Manually (Page 2): A place where the human owner of the resource or a knowledgable, identified person can suggest a replacement for an URL. (E.g., "I have lost access to this subtree. The new, updated version is _here_."
-- jutta, Nov 13 2004

Source of the name. http://www.halfbake...oken_3f_5d_20button
[contracts] used it as a sample nonexistant website, prompting me to search for an excuse to create it. [jutta, Nov 13 2004]

http://www.archive.org Always a good fall-back, but I don't want a copy of the original document; I want the a new address of the live, maintained, document. [jutta, Nov 13 2004]

Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org
Proof of concept of a fully open-maintance collaborative database [contracts, Nov 13 2004]

Krelnik's content-based angle. http://www.halfbake...m/idea/Link_20Rover
[jutta, Nov 15 2004]

What about a modified form of the second means, where helpful (but less authoritative) people can point out other possibilities?
-- Detly, Nov 13 2004


[jutta] said //a knowledgable, identified person can suggest a replacement// and [detly] said that helpful //people can point out other possibilities//

Sounds like you're both describing a sort of 'Linkipedia'[+]
-- contracts, Nov 13 2004


//create a monstrous library db//
It may not be indexed precisely for the purpose of this idea, but I think said database already exists. Google.

My idea "Link Rover" in this category was a different approach to this same problem: capture the target page text at the time the webmaster creates the link initially, so that later when the link breaks a replacement can be found in an automated fashion.

Perhaps this idea, implemented as a web service instead of a web site, would be the back-end of a client-server version of Link Rover.
-- krelnik, Nov 15 2004


I think your Rover and my Emporium would augment each other well - one looks at context, the other at content. (For the prototype, we can use archive.org as your monstrous database.)
-- jutta, Nov 15 2004



random, halfbakery