Wayback Machine | Omnipemf (2024)

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Wayback Machine Overview and History:
– Founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat.
– Launched publicly in October 2001 with over 10 billion archived pages.
– Allows users to view historical versions of web pages.
– Named after a fictional time-traveling device.
– Contains over 468 billion web pages.
– Purpose is to provide access to archived web pages.
– Offers a digital archive service for internet history preservation.

Technical Information and Storage Capacity:
– Software crawls the web for publicly accessible information and data files.
– Developed Archive-It.org to handle inconsistencies in partially cached websites.
– Crawls contributed by various sources like Sloan Foundation and Alexa.
– Worldwide Web Crawls have been running since 2010.
– Stored on PetaBox rack systems custom designed by Internet Archive staff.
– Storage capacity increased by 700 terabytes in 2011 with new racks.
– Growing at a rate of 12 terabytes per month in 2003.
– New version with updated interface made available for public testing in 2011.

Archival Requests, Retrievals, and Recent Developments:
– Users limited to 15 requests and retrievals per minute since October 2019.
– Crawls can take months to complete depending on website size.
– Multiple crawls ongoing simultaneously for various websites.
– Introduced fact-checking in October 2020.
– Domains of ad servers disabled from capturing as of January 2022.
– Save a Page feature introduced in October 2013.
– Ground-breaking milestone of 240 billion URLs announced in January 2013.

Legal Issues, Exclusions, and Controversies:
– Wayback Machine respects robots exclusion standard (robots.txt).
– Website owners could opt-out through robots.txt.
– Legal challenges over archived content have occurred.
– Some entities have sued Internet Archive over its archiving practices.
– Settlement agreements have been reached in some cases.
– Some legal cases have questioned the admissibility of Wayback Machine snapshots.

Impact, Uses, and Community Involvement:
– Wayback Machine helps recover over 9 million broken links on Wikipedia.
– Valuable resource for historical web content, researchers, and journalists.
– Collaboration with Cloudflare for a more reliable web experience.
– Used for investigative research, academic purposes, and evidence in legal cases.
– Relies on user donations for sustainability and provides a digital library of free content.

Wayback Machine (Wikipedia)

For the time machine from Peabody's Improbable History and its namesake, see Wayback Machine (Peabody's Improbable History).

The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive, an American nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California. Created in 1996 and launched to the public in 2001, it allows the user to go "back in time" to see how websites looked in the past. Its founders, Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat, developed the Wayback Machine to provide "universal access to all knowledge" by preserving archived copies of defunct web pages.

Wayback Machine

Type of site	Archive
Founded	May10, 1996; 27 years ago (private) October24, 2001; 22 years ago (public)
Areaserved	Worldwide (except China, Russia, and Bahrain)
Owner	Internet Archive
URL	web.archive.org
Commercial	No
Registration	Optional
Currentstatus	Active
Writtenin	HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Java, Python

Launched on May 10, 1996, the Wayback Machine had saved more than 38.2 billion web pages at the end of 2009. As of January 3, 2024, the Wayback Machine has archived more than 860 billion web pages and well over 99 petabytes of data.

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