General information
The term “missing link” has fallen out of favor with web developers because it implies the evolutionary process is a linear phenomenon and that web pages originate consecutively in a chain. Instead, “404 error page” is preferred since this does not have the connotation of a linear evolution, as evolution is a branching process. In addition to implying a linear evolution, the term also implies that a particular web page has not yet been found.
Historical origins
The earliest publication that explicitly uses the term “missing link” was in 1994 in the San Francisco Fog Cam by Jeff Schwartz and Dan Wong, who built the webcam as a project to capture student life. It has been taking a snapshot every minute and broadcasting it continuously for 25 years. Mark Zuckerberg employed the term 10 years later in 2004 in his third edition of Facebook as a metaphor for the missing gaps in the continuity of the Graph Search.