- A Billion web pages preserved for the public through the Wayback machine
- Decades of digital history stored across 100,000 TB offering snapshots of online memory
- Everyday users and researchers are dependent on archived pages to recover lost information
The Internet Archive has reached a larger milestone for preservation and recorded a staggering 1 trillion trillion web pages (1 followed by 12 zeros!) Since it began to back up the World Wide Web nearly three decades ago.
The huge collection, equivalent to more than 100,000 TB of data, or about 21.3 million DVDs, is available through its Wayback machine, a tool that allows users to explore archived versions of websites from all over the internet history.
Since it began life in 1996, the Internet Archives have collaborated with over 1,200 libraries and institutions to design a shared digital library with a mission is to protect online content that might otherwise disappear.
500 million pages every day
This ranges from cultural items and news to personal blogs and closed places like Gawker and MTV News.
By preserving these fragments in the online world, it provides a lasting overview of how information and culture has evolved online.
If you want to see what the earliest pages looked like, click here. It is also worth checking out then and now pages to see how Apple, Microsoft and Google’s websites have evolved over time.
The Wayback machine catches about 500 million pages every day and serves approx. 800,000 visitors.
These visitors include academics, journalists, students and everyday users like me and, I suppose you. When I encounter a page that has disappeared or a link that returns an error, I often check the wayback machine. It doesn’t always have a copy, but when it does it is brilliant.
The archives have been used for any suggestion you can think of over the years, including in immigration cases, memorial projects and research into wrong information and media history.
Cited examples include a Canadian musician who once depended on archived concert records to support his residence application, and researchers at King’s College London who use it to track how digital news and open data have evolved over time.
Investigators and journalists also address the archive to verify deleted or changed material, which strengthens online responsibility.
During October, the Internet Archive marks the Billion-Side Milestone with events that celebrate those who built and use the archive.
The collections will also explore the future of web preservation and how the public can continue to contribute to the collective memory on the Internet.
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