Today, I was trying to find a article that I had recalled reading a couple of months ago. As most do, my first step was to ‘google’ it. The article presented itself in the search criteria. Clicking on the first two results from the search entry gave me results informing me “Sorry, this article is no longer available.”
No reason as to why it is no longer available. Not enough disk space? Too difficult to maintain? I would think that news agencies would want to keep their articles available. I’ve actually started keeping a copy of articles that I reference in my blog just in case the article ever ‘disappears’. This way, I always have a copy and can manually link to it, should it get pulled down for some unknown reason. This of course is completely counter-intuitive to how the Internet is suppose to work. Most websites prefer that you ‘link’ to them instead which I am glad to do. But for that privilege I expect that the site will keep the article available for view. If the article moves, then use a HTTP 302 “Moved Permanently” message with a link to where the article now is. This fuction in HTTP has been around for years for just this purpose and most browsers will automatically follow the link in these requests making it transparent to the user.
Fortunately, after much searching I was able to find the article here. And yes, I’ve extracted a copy just in case it ‘disappears’ in the future.
