May 2024: Wayback Machine/Legacy.com analysis

*

*

In my recent post I promised to provide a detailed presentation of all the statistical evidence related to the deletion of records at Legacy.com. This is the next in a series of posts that will provide the comparison of historical data recorded at the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for the “world’s largest obituary database”, Legacy.com, with what is currently offered at that site.

*

Go to the Wayback Machine.

Enter this URL in the search box:

https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/search

Go to the first and last day available for May of 2024 that have “recent results” numbers. Choose the first timestamp for the earliest date in the month.

*

*

Choose the last timestamp for the latest date in the month.

*

*

With these “recent results” figures, we will be subtracting the earliest number from the latest to get the number of records accumulated between the two dates. In this month that is 158,728. Now we will adjust for the missing days. We will divide 158,728 by 29 and get 5,473. That is our daily average for this month. We have 2 days unaccounted for in our range. So 2 times 5,473 equals 10,946. That added to 158,728 is our adjusted total of 169,674.

*

Go to the current Legacy.com website.

Do an advanced search with a custom publication date for only May of 2024.

*

*

*

*

169,674 - 138,693

= 30,981 deleted records

*

*

*

* I do not have paid subscriptions. But if you want to help me out, please consider contributing to a crowd fund I have to pay for a FOIA (public records request). Thank you.

Thanks for reading csofand’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.