About half the URLs still worked. In some cases, the companies were still operating. But many Web sites were still lurking out there even after their non-virtual companions had closed down. Or, a handy domain name had been bought up by someone else after the original owner went under. A list of the more amusing dead or half-dead pages appears below.
Web content is sometimes goofy.
There's no news there. But what is new is the size of the problem. As the Internet gets bigger, so does the number of bad pages. I sure have. The NEC Research Institute study showed as much as 5 percent of search engines results are broken links - links to pages that have disappeared or moved.