A dead link is a locked door
Somewhere in New York tonight a food pantry's page says it is open on Tuesdays, and the page is gone. What happens next, and the small software that walks the city checking.
A help listing is a promise: a pantry on Tuesdays, a legal clinic on the first Thursday, a coat drive until the end of the month. The promise is usually kept by the people. It is the page that breaks. Sites get rebuilt, a volunteer leaves, a hosting bill lapses, and the link that a hundred other pages point to now opens on nothing. The person who needed Tuesday finds a locked door, and no one knows how many of them there were.
The walk
Every night a piece of software we call the Keeper walks the engine's directory of ways to help in New York, link by link, and asks each one a simple question: do you still answer? When a page is dead, the Keeper looks for the last good copy in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, and if one exists, the listing points there instead, marked plainly as a saved copy, until the real page comes back. When a date has passed, the listing comes down. Every one of those changes is written in the engine's public log with a link, so anyone can check the Keeper's work.
September, counted
In its first full month the Keeper's walk produced these receipts, all on the public log:
| What | How many |
|---|---|
| Dead listings brought back with a saved copy | 5 |
| Dead links and past dates taken off the board | 6 |
| Public-interest pages saved to the Wayback Machine before they could vanish | 20 |
| Listings checked live by visitors pressing the button | 7 |
Small numbers. They are supposed to be: the directory is small and the city is large. The point is not the count, it is the receipt. A repair you can click is worth more than a claim you cannot.
What you can do with it
If you run an organization in New York and your listing on the engine ever shows a saved copy instead of your page, that is the Keeper telling you your door is locked. Fix the page, and the Keeper will notice within a day. If your organization is not on the directory, it can be. If you are a person who found a locked door, press the button on the engine and it will check the listing for you on the spot.
Nobody holds a parade for a link that works. It just means the person who needed Tuesday got Tuesday.