I may be the only human being on this earth to have noticed this, but the Random Yahoo Link was not functional for a couple of days, and I thought for sure the link had been discontinued. The link (http://random.yahoo.com/bin/ryl) which sends you to a random web page from the Yahoo directory instead (for at least a 24-hour period) sent you to Yahoo’s home page. I prepared to write an RIP, RYL obit until I found that the RYL works again.

The Random Yahoo Link has been the home page for my web browsers for as long as I can remember. Random links may be a niche fascination but a high-quality random link is hard to find, and by my estimate the Random Yahoo Link is king. The RYL sends me to the moldering, abandoned, SEO-be-damned corners of the World Wide Web, to web pages set up in the mid-20th century and inactive for 13 years save for the hit counters announcing “You are visitor number 18 since July, 1997!” I love finding pages like that. I reload such pages, watching the counter increase one by one until it reaches some multiple-zero-ending plateau, then I hit the RYL again and move on, finding personal web sites of humans who “ live pointless, sad lives of noisy desperation“. With another click I’m off to laproscopy.com, where a webcast database looks to me like something that was unintentionally left sitting on the public Internet. Hitting the RYL once more I would be confronted with the International Association of Crystal Healing Therapists and with that I would get back to my day, having sated my mercurial need for randomness.

For as long as I have made web sites (16 years and counting) I felt that a random link was a standard feature of any web site with a substantial quantity of content pages. I think I owe this belief to Yahoo, whose random link has been in service for virtually as long as Yahoo itself. For a certain type of web site a random link seems to me as natural a feature as a water fountain at a public park, and among my collection of random links are these which send you to Random Receipts, a Random Mailbox. I used to have a page which showed one of 25,000 random pictures I have taken any time you reloaded the page but I had to get rid of that.

I would be surprised if Yahoo pulled the plug on the RYL because Yahoo is an INTERNET company, and a random link is precisely the sort of harmless, self-perpetuating sleight-of-hand widget that INTERNET DOUBLE-U-DOUBLE-U-DOUBLE-U companies know to execute. The company’s gigormous list of links seems like the perfect source for a random link of virtually infinite clicks to non-repeating destinations.

On the other hand I can easily imagine the company’s decision-making process to remove the link. The decision would comprise board-room meetings and flowcharts analyzing cost vs. benefit and safety risks. The potential risks of sending a Yahoo site visitor to a random link on the WWW could be substantial, and when it was gone I imagined an incident in which the RYL sent someone to a rogue web site, exploding their computer and destroying their life. Bad things can happen, and in fact the quality of the RYL, while still generally high, has fallen off of late as more and more of the sites it sends you to contain link farms, parked domains, and otherwise sketchy content. The relative innocence of the RYL bucks one of the trends in web-surfing that had eluded me over the last several years: People have become skeptical about clicking on links. Clicking links! The link — the hypertext transfer protocol link — is a fundamental unit of Internet currency but its reputation has been degraded over the years. Web sites and domain names change hands, businesses come and go, and a legitimate business or personal web page Yahoo linked to 14 years ago might today belong to a Lithuanian malware portal or a nasal porn fiesta. People die without leaving so much as a password and their domain names eventually get released to the domaining pool, carpeted with penny-per-click advertisements, and sometimes the site-owner’s web legacy is summarily removed from the waybackmachine via robots.txt and other brute-force techniques. When the Random Yahoo Link was not working the other day I imagined that Yahoo decided quality control of this relatively obscure feature was no longer worthwhile in light of the evolving vagaries of the sites linked to from its directory.

So, happily, I do not have to change my home page from http://random.yahoo.com/bin/ryl, and instead of wasting these energies spent lamenting its demise I’ll just take its temporary absence as a chance to appreciate its continued existence.

UPDATE: The Random Yahoo! Link is officially dead. Long live the RYL.