Internet Archive announces achievement
The Internet Archive Wayback Machine, an indispensable chronicler of the Web for going on two decades now, late last week announced a major milestone.
From an Internet Archive blog post:
The Wayback Machine, a digital archive of the World Wide Web, has reached a landmark with 400 billion webpages indexed. This makes it possible to surf the web as it looked anytime from late 1996 up until a few hours ago.
The post lists a number of historical highlights, including:
- 2001 – The Wayback Machine is launched. Woo hoo.
- 2006 – Archive-It is launched, allowing libraries that subscribe to the service to create curated collections of valuable web content.
- March 25, 2009 – The Internet Archive and Sun Microsystems launch a new datacenter that stores the whole web archive and serves the Wayback Machine. This 3 Petabyte data center handled 500 requests per second from its home in a shipping container.
- October 26, 2012 – Internet Archive makes 80 terabytes of archived web crawl data from 2011 available for researchers, to explore how others might be able to interact with or learn from this content.
- October 2013 – New features for the Wayback Machine are launched, including the ability to see newly crawled content an hour after we get it, a “Save Page” feature so that anyone can archive a page on demand, and an effort to fix broken links on the web starting with WordPress.com and Wikipedia.org.
Not included in the timeline was mention of a fire on Nov. 6 of last year that did more than $600,000 to digitization equipment at the Internet Archive’s scanning center in San Francisco.
(What online news sites looked like on 9/11)
The Wayback Machine has proven useful to me on a number of occasions, most memorably in assembling this collection of online news site images from Sept. 11, 2001, forever known as 9/11.
Four hundred billion is a lot of pages. In fact, the archive now serves up about 100 billion more pages than McDonald’s has served hamburgers.
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