Google Partners With Internet Archive To Link To Archives In Search

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: Rolling out starting today, Google Search results will now directly link to The Internet Archive to add historical context for the links in your results. [...] Google has partnered with The Internet Archive, a non-profit research library that, in part, stores and preserves massive portions of the web to be easily referenced later. This is done through the "Wayback Machine" which can show a website or specific page as it existed on a previous date. Through this new partnership, Google will link directly to The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine for pages that you find in Search.

To access The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine links through Google Search you'll need to click the three-dots menu button that appears alongside all search results and then tap on "More about this page." This new feature is still actively rolling out, but Google was able to provide an image to show what the integration looks like. In a post regarding the announcement, The Internet Archive said that this partnership "underscores the importance of web archiving."

"In the case of Goliath Jr. v. Sr., how find ye?"

[Pseudonymous Powers]

After losing their recent court case with the book publishers, it makes sense for the Internet Archive to partner with Google. If I remember correctly, Google had a similar lawsuit filed against them back in the day, and their successful defense was "We're Google, and we do what we want; shut up and take it."

Re:

[Samantha Wright]

I read the last judgement in the Hachette v. IA case when it came out, and it does mention the Google Books case. The actual successful defence was Google Books doesn't compete with eBook sales because it added something novel (global, simultaneous search) without replacing an eBook entirely (because you can only read a couple of pages before it locks you out.)

Most people are unaware that the Internet Archive's mission to make eBooks loanable conflicts not with normal consumer book sales or eBook sales, but

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Google's case was different because they only gave access to snippets of books, so had a fair use defence. The IA was lending complete books.

I'm not so keen on using the IA as an archival source. For some reason it is very slow outside the US. Archived sites take minutes to load, and accessing archived materials (upload or download) is extremely slow as well. If you VPN into the US it is suddenly much faster.

This behaviour makes me think that the IA is not a suitable repository of this material, and we shou

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[codebase7]

As much as I'd love to bash the US in this case, any suggestions on where you'd put it and why? Slow downs are rampant all over the world. Regardless of jurisdiction. If your sole consideration is "how fast the content loads" then you're playing straight into the hands of those trying to censor or block your access.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

It's not a location issue, the deliberately slow down connections outside the US.

I'd distribute it, and then use Cloudflare or similar to ensure it is fast everywhere.

Like the great work done with Deja News archive?

[djc6]

Can you please hand over Deja News archive to Internet Archive so its searchable again? This important part of Internet History is effectively gone because of how broken Google Groups is.

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[ArchieBunker]

Wonder how big the archive is? (minus the binaries groups)

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[machineghost]

No to mention the Google Cache, which they've all but removed. I'm sure they have tons of sites in that cache that the Wayback Machine could use; let's hope they decide to share it before deleting it.

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[antdude]

Also, can we resurrect it again? It was so useful in real time.

"Adding context"

[Valgrus Thunderaxe]

I hope it's not done in the same condescending manner as their "context" dialogs on YouTube, which I'd rather not see, at all.

I think this is a bad idea.

[vrhelmutt]

There are many people who use the court to go after IA to remove their work or cite their work being there as a reason to shut them down. There are so many more property holders that still don't know about IA and I believe Google integration is just going to speed IA's inevitable demise. Another reason for me to become a millionaire and back the site up.

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[rrab]

I share your cynicism towards this partnership. I've experienced Google Search removing search results for my name. Same query, later date. Google isn't shy about belligerent censorship, so I suppose I'm expecting a Microsoft-esque "embrace, extend, extinguish" series of corporate moves? I do enjoy being wrong, and hopefully this partnership injected some needed funding into the internet archive. The Modulation article on Wikipedia, and my open-source pulse modulation project, wouldn't be the same without t

Is this functionality desirable?

[mmell]

I honestly don't know, and I don't know what pressures Google may or may not have brought to bear to get access to search the internet archive. I don't know if the group running the internet archive welcome this or fought it. I do know that it's a significant investment on Google's part, in fact. Is this something Google users want? My intuitive (unconsidered) answer would be "yes", but that opinion formed some few milliseconds before I thought to myself that I would probably never use it, except maybe

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[Samantha Wright]

The service Google is providing is just a link to Wayback on pages they already index. It's probably not that big of a deal for them in terms of resources. Thus you won't be able to find your old Geocities site at its original URL as it no longer exists there, and wouldn't show up in Google searches normally. However, the Internet Archive did download the site in 2009, and much of it is available if you know where to look, either using Wayback directly or through a front-end like oocities.org.

People in the

The books are saved...

[usedtobestine]

Because google is going to index them fully.

Fuck off publishers!!!

Bleeping google

[belg4mit]

And are they going to donate to IA to offset all of that traffic? Much of which was previously unneeded before google removed access to its own crawling cache?

Not new

[ledow]

"We outsourced our old 'Cached Version' link that we took away years ago to Internet Archive", basically.

Didn't Google have an abbreviated version of this?

[alleycat0]

I recall (some years back) that next to each Google reference was a link to a cached version of the referenced page, which was really useful when the page was no longer extant. I realize that the feature was a far cry from the granularity that an Internet Archive link can provide, but I've long wondered why that useful feature disappeared.