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Inside the Internet Archives
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Jun 18, 2008 09:46 AM
from the those-who-ignore-history-are-doomed-to-eat-a-sandwich dept.
from the those-who-ignore-history-are-doomed-to-eat-a-sandwich dept.
blackbearnh writes "O'Reilly Media is running an interview with Gordon Mohr, Chief Technologist for the Internet Archive (archive.org). If you've ever wondered how pages are selected for archiving, or just how they manage such a huge quantity of data, the answers are here. The interview also touches on the problems of intellectual property in archives, archiving the Internet in a post Web 2.0 world, and the potential vulnerabilities exposed by archiving web sites that may include security exploits."
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Oblig. Clark/Kubrick (Score:3, Funny)
mutual exclusivity? (Score:4, Funny)
If Twitter becomes so mainstream so as to be more than a 'remember when?' to posterity I will kill myself.
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Hopefully they've got a reasonable enough algorithm that it can pick the useful sites from the random blog crap.
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Twitter seems useless to me. Maybe if my friends used it I might, but for now an away message or facebook status does the job just fine.
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but is it indexed by google? (Score:4, Funny)
Damn it! (Score:2)
The only page from Yello There I can find is one that was linked from my site (the aformentioned Quake site). That particular page was wonderfully recursive because of Yello's frame.
I wished archive.org stored even more stuff (Score:4, Insightful)
Combining a bookmarking / chaching service would be really handy.
Re:I wished archive.org stored even more stuff (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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I really think the bookmark + cache would be a nice thing to have without resorting to 'dead tree' format.
But it's a good point, a printer would be an easy way to collect stuff that you really want / need to keep.
Re:I wished archive.org stored even more stuff (Score:4, Interesting)
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I'd never even heard of them.
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New material is always being added to The Archive's web archive, and (afaik) unlike the collections archive it is never deliberately deleted. Most of what appears to be "pages going AWOL" is indexing errors. In order for newly archived stuff to become visible to the wayback machine interface, the entire web archive needs to be periodically re-indexed. Unfortunately the indexing process is error-prone, and stuff that might have been accessible before the index might disappear afterwards (and appear again aft
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slashdot uid (Score:2)
I blame Internet Archive for this and ask twitter and his sock puppet army to start ranting about this horrible horrible travesty as well. The loss of my 5 digit uid is as bad as Gitmo and waterboarding combined!
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Sorry, I couldn't resist.
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Combining a bookmarking / chaching service would be really handy.
Install the Scrapbook add-on for Firefox, [mozilla.org] which does exactly that. You can save URLs, pages, sets of linked pages, and/or selected areas simply by right-clicking and selecting 'Capture'.
The pages are saved in a folder of your choosing, can be organized in a hierarchy and also searched and viewed using the add-on; It even has a feature to 'refresh' a saved paged from its URL, or just send you to the page's original URL.
Finally, it has a quick element editor that lets you remove page elements, add 'sticky' n
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Wayback (Score:5, Informative)
At one point, I forgot to renew my domain name and a squatter snatched it up the second it was available. I have since lost the html/java applets/images/etc that I had originally there. I used to show people what it looked like via the wayback machine. But you can't do it anymore. Example: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.mindchild.net [archive.org]
Apparently, the current squatter put a robots.txt on that domain, and wayback refuses to show any ARCHIVED pages where the domain CURRENTLY has a robots.txt. I emailed them about it, and after a couple of months, I actually got a reply pretty much saying "That is just the way it is. We are underfunded and have no time to fix it. Sorry".
So if for some reason you don't want to have your site viewable via the wayback machine, just put up a robots.txt. It doesn't even need to contain anything.
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Should the robots.txt ever go away or change then your old stuff will become accessible again.
Re:Wayback (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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If you publish something, you lose the right to withdraw it from the public archives retrospectively. That's part of the "contract" (term used figuratively) with the public that establishes the foundation of copyright law.
If you don't want it to appear on the Wayback Machine, you have an ability called robots.txt. That's already more than you have if you publish a book and want to keep it out of libraries. In neither case, though, do you have the right to demand or expect the content to be removed from the archive on your request.
I see what the archive does to be a courtesy service, not something that the site owners should expect.
Parent
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Well, what the heck is the point for a Wayback Machine that refuses to way back, then?
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But, it is interesting how they take the current robots.txt to apply to old content that used to be at that location...
Re:Wayback (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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Squatters & robots.txt Re:Wayback (Score:5, Informative)
We'd like to address it, and to do so there are two major issues to be tackled: (1) our current Wayback Machine software only excludes sites on a "for all time" basis; (2) short of mechanistically trusting the current domain owner, determining who has the right to exclude or restore material could be a very labor-intensive, error-prone, and liability-compounding process.
The new open-source 'Wayback' software, which will go live for the Worldwide Wayback Machine later this year, enables time-range exclusions. (It's currently only used for many smaller collections we do for partners.) That should give us the capability to address (1). Addressing (2) will require further discussion about the proper and efficient policies -- but it's on our agenda once the technical capability for time-range exclusions is in place.
Specifically regarding the mindchild.net site you mention, it looks like the issue is that our current retroactive-exclude robots.txt-parser doesn't understand the 'Allow' directive. (The mindchild.net/robots.txt tries to enable ia_archiver/WaybackMachine access via an 'Allow'.) That too will be fixed in the new 'Wayback' deploy (if not sooner).
- Gordon @ IA
Parent
Downside of IP conciderations... (Score:2, Insightful)
I went to archive.org years later looking for them cause I remember back in the day they nabbed em and now they're all gone. The images and sounds I used were all gone.
I wanted to recreate a page from that archive for nostalgia reasons with my old friends. Can't do it and I can't find the files anymore in my local archives.
I was kinda disappointed but I guess i
Er, what? (Score:2)
Ew.
selection? funding? why not plain Debian? (Score:3, Insightful)
I was left with a several questions that weren't addressed by the article.
The slashdot summary says the article explains how pages are selected for archiving, but I couldn't find anything in the article that explicitly explained that. It does say that the actual crawler is run by alexa, which hands off the data to them, but it didn't say what the criteria were. Alexa computes various stats about web sites, so presumably they could apply some kind of minimum cut. Or do they try to index every single lame personal page, unless the owner opts out? That seems like it would require an unreasonable amount of disk space. The web also has a lot of stuff like, e.g., the kind of spam sites that try to scam google's search/ad system; I wonder if the archive records those.
The article didn't say a darn thing about funding. They have to run thousands of machines, so the electric bills must be formidable. Where the heck do they get their money? Is there a significant chance that their funding will dry up at some point in the future, and the whole archive will disappear?
The article states that they moved from plain Debian to Ubuntu. That surprised me, and I was curious why they'd do that. E.g., if you're shopping for webhosts, it's much more common for them to offer plain Debian than Ubuntu. I love Ubuntu as a desktop distro, but it surprises me that they'd see any big advantage in using Ubuntu for their application.
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I can state to an absolute certainty that they do index very lame sites.
One of my first web pages ever. Very lame indeed!
http://web.archive.org/web/20010404062818/http://loether.com/ [archive.org]
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I can't comment in more detail about Alexa's bulk crawl strategy because it is only documented to the public (and us at the Internet Archive) in general terms: it is a broad survey crawl of the public web, weighted by Alexa's internal measures of site/page importance and legitimacy (which are at least partially based on the same toolbar data that drives their site rankings). While we expect to continue receiving the Alexa donations indefinitely, a growing proportion of the public archive is likely to come f
Remember Slashdot in it's Infancy? (Score:5, Interesting)
http://web.archive.org/web/19980113191222/http://slashdot.org/ [archive.org]
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Holy shit, has it really been 10 years since this?
"archiving the Internet in a post Web 2.0 world" (Score:2)
I can't stand "post [xyz] world", "pre [xyz] mindset" or any such similar phrases. Go away, GO AWAY!!!!
Really, the archive is tasked with 'saving' the internet every so often. I'm sure they'll figure out how to save AJAX stuff. And if not, then that stuff isn't really meant to be saved, now is it? (I mean, we don't need a save of Gmail, since it's account based.)
Searchable Archive. . . (Score:2)
This was very exciting! Seriously; you might remember the content of a page you were looking at five years ago, but can you remember it's specific web address? --Especially with the turnover and abandoning of domain names, it is entirely possible to simply lose contact
I meant 'Date' (Score:2)
Normally I let typos go; people are generally forgiving and will read around them knowing that they are just as susceptible to making errors, but in the case of those typos which don't just create a spelling mistake, but actually switch the meaning of an entire sentence, I will sometimes haul myself to the task of writing a short retraction. Just like this one.
Cheers.
-FL
Re:Searchable Archive. . . (Score:4, Informative)
'Recall' wasn't exactly Google-like search. IIRC, in some respects it was better, with an advanced idea of related concepts, and with data on frequency of terms over time. In other respects, it was not what people would expect: there was no exact phrase matching, and certain terms that didn't become tracked concepts weren't findable at all, even though you could see the words in other indexed results.
Unfortunately, IA couldn't maintain the deployment when the developer, Anna Patterson, moved to Google. So, Recall turned out to be a short-lived experiment, grand in scale of pages indexed and novel features but not in traffic served.
Patterson did big things at Google and now has another search startup, Cuill, that's likely to do more good things for the web.
At the Internet Archive, we've also been using the open-source projects Nutch and Hadoop to offer search on smaller web collections for our partners. (A pair of such searchable partner collections for the US National Archives and Records Administration lives at webharvest.gov [webharvest.gov].) Someday we may be able to scale these up to the full 11+ year archive.
- Gordon @ IAParent
I thought he worked for Intel (Score:2)
My Issues With Archive.org (Score:2)
But more than that, it's a PITA to visit an archived page, and manually copy and paste every single link, one at a time. And I'm sure most p
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#1: It's done with javascript, as someone else already said.
#2: The Deriver system's video encoding was the attempt of a few people (usually one, sometimes two, occasionally three, often zero) to get something that would work at all with as much of the content as possible. If a change improved output for some items, while causing new problems for others, it tended to not be adopted. The Archive has always been bad about getting back to volunteers. It takes manpower to reply and incorporate third partie
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#2 I remain convinced the conversion system was simply set up by woefully unqualified individuals. I've done several such systems that are surely much more complicated. Traveling to the Bay Area in person would be prohibitive. Oh well.
#3 Thanks for the explanation.
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The transition from Debian to Ubuntu was driven by developers' desire for more and newer features. We originally went with Debian-Stable because it was, well, stable, and did everything we needed the PetaBox to do at the time. But programmers whined and moaned that such-and-such package wasn't supported, or was too old, and claimed that this held back development of features which Brewster wanted to see made into reality.
Brewster was never much for stability anyway, so the transition was made. It bit u