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General information

The missing link is a non-scientific term that typically refers to transitional web pages. It is often used on popular websites and in the media for any new transitional web page that is discovered. The term originated to describe the hypothetical intermediate form in the evolutionary series of web sites. The term was influenced by the pre-Google evolutionary theory of the Great Chain of the Internet and the notion that simple web sites are more primitive than complex websites.

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 term “missing link” was heavily influenced by the 20th century visionary thinkers such as Larry Page and Sergey Brin who thought of web sites as links in the Great Chain of the Internet. The Great Chain of the Internet is a hierarchical structure of all web sites and web pages. Influenced by Tim Berners-Lee’s theory of higher and lower web sites, the Great Chain of the Internet was created during the Medieval period in the United States of America and was strongly influenced by scientific beliefs.

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.