No More Broken Links?

from the who-needs-'em? dept

Some student interns at IBM have apparently come up with a system for discovering and fixing broken links. While systems that check links and alert you if they've changed have been around for a while (with varying degrees of usefulness), this one also tries to figure out where the existing page moved to or if it can find an equivalent page of information -- and makes the change automatically (sometimes first asking for permission). What might be interesting is if they hooked this system up to the Web Archive. While it looks targeted at intranet usage, it would be great for the rest of the web as well. Imagine that as soon as a page goes down, the system either finds the same version elsewhere on that site, or shifts the link to the Web Archive version.