The Pew Research Center published a shocking study recently which showed that the internet is disappearing. Web pages and online content is literally becoming lost! For example:

"Of the webpages that existed in 2013, for instance, 38 per cent are now lost. Even newer pages are disappearing: 8 per cent of pages that existed in 2023 are no longer available."

The study shows that vast amounts of news and important reference content (like recipes!) are disappearing.

"Some 23 per cent of news pages include at least one broken link, and 21 per cent of government websites, it said – and 54 per cent of Wikipedia pages include a link in their references that no longer exists."

Wow! This means that many of those delicious recipes that you found on the internet 5 or 10 years ago are gone!

But, I wondered...what about the recipes posted on blogs and other social media websites?

"Much the same effect is happening on social media. A fifth of tweets disappear from the site within months of being posted."

I was so surprised by this that I was in disbelief! But, as I thought about my website, I remembered how difficult it has been for the Cook'n programmers to keep our web pages accessible.

For example, earlier this year, due to changes in web browser constraints, we had to change the security settings on www.dvo.com. Changing these settings had the effect of breaking many links which would lead people to see a "Page Not Found" error message. To avoid this, we had to add additional logic (including a number of redirects) to keep everything functional and accessible.

It took some time but we were able to overcome the issues we faced. But, that's because we have a staff of senior level developers who could make these changes. Those who may have built a recipe website years ago, for example, may not have an active staff right now who can maintain that site and keep those recipe web pages accessible!

As I thought about this, it reminded me of a knock, knock joke:

Knock, knock...

Who's there?

Orange

Orange who?

Orange you glad you saved those recipes to Cook'n?

Seriously though...there are many people who have not discovered Cook'n yet. And, when they find a good recipe on the internet, they bookmark it. Or, they pin it to Pinterest. Or, they email the link to themselves or save the link in their Notes app.

As many people are now finding out, many of those links (almost half of them according to the Pew Research Center) are gone forever!

I'm curious...have you experienced this? If so, please add a comment to the bottom of this web page and let us know.

Fortunately, those of you who use Cook'n have not lost those delicious, one-of-a-kind recipes. That's because, when you find a great recipe on the internet, Cook'n users can click Capture to save the recipe into their own personal recipe database.

The following graphic captures this concept. In this diagram, this woman has the Cook'n app on her laptop, her tablet, and on her phone. And, all of her recipes...the recipes she pinned on Pinterest, the recipes she found on the internet, her hand-written recipes, and even the recipes from her favorite cookbooks...are all saved in her Cook'n Cloud account for easy access from all of her devices.

The following video explains this concept in greater detail:


If you don't have Cook'n yet, click here and download Cook'n today!

If you do have Cook'n, way to go! Keep Capturing those great recipes and saving them to your personal cookbooks!