“The Internet echoes with the empty spaces where data used to be.”
– Alexis Rossi from the Wayback Machine
The Internet Archive recently unveiled a new plan to fix broken links utilizing the Wayback Machine.
The Wayback Machine provides digital captures of URLs to create stable access to websites that otherwise might vanish. The service initially launched in 2001 with 10 billion pages. Today it archives 10 billion pages every 10 weeks and currently contains more than 360 billion URL snapshots.
We have been serving archived web pages to the public via the Wayback Machine for twelve years now, and it is gratifying to see how this service has become a medium of record for so many. Wayback pages are cited in papers, referenced in news articles and submitted as evidence in trials. Now even the U.S. government relies on this web archive.
Steady improvements to the Wayback Machine have been made over the past year to keep pace with the always evolving digital landscape of the Internet. Content went from being a year out of date to appearing in the Wayback Machine an hour after a site is crawled. Anyone can create a permanent URL to cite a page and the Wayback Machine supports a number of different APIs.
Part of what makes the web so great is its churning and ephemeral nature, but as more and more of our culture and history is built on the dunes of ever-shifting silicates, we stand to stumble forward without a clear sense of where we’ve come from, like Guy Pierce’s amnesiac in Memento. The Wayback Machine improves the web’s memory and in a way, our own.
In becoming better equipped to keep up with the growing Internet, the Wayback Machine has also become a well-suited solution to the broken link epidemic. It is first working with individual webmasters and a couple larger sites such as WordPress and Wikipedia:
Webmasters can add a short snippet of code to their 404 page that will let users know if the Wayback Machine has a copy of the page in our archive – your web pages don’t have to die!
We started with a big goal — to archive the Internet and preserve it for history. This year we started looking at the smaller goals — archiving a single page on request, making pages available more quickly, and letting you get information back out of the Wayback in an automated way. We have spent 17 years building this amazing collection, let’s use it to make the web a better place.
