Inside the Internet Archives

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."

Comments

but is it indexed by google?

[AliasMarlowe]

and does archive.org record google's cache?

Wayback

[TheRealMindChild]

While I love the wayback machine, a little "problem" creped in a couple of years ago that is still there... and it drives me nuts.

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

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.

Re:Wayback

[SydShamino]

If it wasn't true, then a site owner would have no way to remove his content from the Wayback Machine retrospectively. I don't necessarily disagree with their policy, but this is the wrong argument for it.

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.

Re:I wished archive.org stored even more stuff

[blhack]

Combining a bookmarking / chaching service would be really handy. I heard that lexmark makes one, its called a "printer".

Remember Slashdot in it's Infancy?

[dbarron]

Check this out....it reads like a free software update blog :)
http://web.archive.org/web/19980113191222/http://slashdot.org/

Squatters & robots.txt Re:Wayback

[gojomo]

Unfortunately, this "squatters-add-robots-restrictions" problem comes up a lot.

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