1 Trillion Web Pages Archived

https://blog.archive.org/trillion/

by pabs3 • 10 months ago

703 94 10 months ago

blog.archive.org

typpilol• 10 months ago

I thought this was going to be a technical article but there was nothing in it

ehsanu1• 10 months ago

Seeing some stats would be fun. I wonder what the amount of data is here. And the distribution would be interesting too, especially since some pages are archived at multiple points in time, and pages have been getting heavier these days.

ChrisArchitect• 10 months ago

Related blog post inviting stories:

https://blog.archive.org/2025/09/23/celebrating-1-trillion-w...

arjie• 10 months ago

Something I wish we could have is some kind of peer mirror of archive.org. The main IA web application gets angry pretty quickly if you're trying to click through a few different dates. If there were some kind of way to slowly mirror (torrent-style) and offer pages as a peer from archive.org that would be neat. It would be cool to show up as an alternative source for the data and the archive.org app could fetch it out of there on a user's choice and validate the checksum if required.

In the end, I've ended up just keeping my own ArchiveBox and it's an all right experience. In the end, it's only useful for things I know I wanted to archive. For almost everything I go to the IA - which has so much.

zapataband2• 10 months ago

Is there such thing as "versioned" torrents? Assuming you have the right PGP key you could mix bittorrent and packaging systems to get an update-able distribution

hsbauauvhabzb• 10 months ago

A Torrent would probably suffocate under the small file distribution. I’m not sure how the romset torrents work but I thought they were versioned.

But torrent is probably the wrong tech. I’m sure there would be many players willing to host a few TB or more each, which could be fronted via something so it’s transparent to the user.

But a better option might be a subscription model, anything else will be slammed by crawlers.

pabs35• 10 months ago

Couple of BEPs related to updating torrents:

https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0039.html https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html

throawayonthe• 10 months ago

trere is the bittorrent v2 standard: https://blog.libtorrent.org/2020/09/bittorrent-v2/

but unfortunately most foss torrent clients do not support it, partly because at release libtorrent 2.0.x had poor io performance in some cases so torrent clients reverted to the 1.2.x branch

pronoiac2• 10 months ago

I think SciOp is doing something in that area, with a catalog site and webseeds. https://sciop.net/

renegat0x0• 10 months ago

- I can confirm that the web archive can be really slow

- I think I have seen that AI scrapers create bottleneck in the bandwidth

- To some digital archives you need to create scientific accounts (I think Common Crawl works like that)

- Data quite easily can be very big. The goal is to store many things. We not only store Internet, but with additional dimension of time

- Since there is a lot of data, it is difficult to navigate it, search it, so it easily can become unusable

- For example that is why I created my own meta data link, I needed some information about domains

Link:

https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

pronoiac2• 10 months ago

The Archive Team - not part of the Internet Archive - worked on a distributed backup of a portion of the Internet Archive - https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK

It's been dormant / on hiatus for a few years now.

smallerize• 10 months ago

That can only cover other collections though, because the WARC files from the Wayback Machine web scrapes are not public.

giancarlostoro• 10 months ago

I do wonder why IA does not maintain a IPFS instance, or if they do, why they're not more popular? There's tons of IPFS mirror services out there that operate at reasonable speeds. One issue I've run into with IA is old enough websites that there's JS or CSS that just wont render, what I'm not sure about is, can we retroactively fix such things? Would be nice to be able to un-ruin the code somehow if they exported everything possible at the time.

Edit:

Would be really neat if you could click on a domain while on IA, and a desktop client downloads as many WAR files in a slower priority download queue, as many as you're interested in, with higher priority pages first, and then you can view it fully offline.

stavros9• 10 months ago

Because nobody pins on IPFS. It's basically http with extra steps, at this point.

TechSquidTV• 10 months ago

They do torrents. I was looking into this recently as well, considering building an Activity Pub alternative to IA. I came to what I assume is the same conclusion that IA came to.

No one uses IPFS. For the average user, it is significantly more difficult to get started. For the experienced user, the ecosystem of tools around IPFS is extremely small.

All in all, IPFS offers very little benefit over torrents in practice and has a much smaller user pool.

komali2• 10 months ago

I spent a bit of time trying to find it just now but I swear I read a super long blog or comment or something by someone at archive.org where they concluded essentially that IPFS just "isn't ready" or wasn't feasible for their needs because it's super slow and they didn't see how that couldn't be the case when they consider the volume of transactions they need to do (they didn't see an optimization path).

I wish I could find that article!

edit: https://github.com/internetarchive/dweb-archive/blob/master/...

stavros9• 10 months ago

I have a design for a system where you can "donate" your disk space to a provider. Basically, you run the client, you say you want to make 1TB available to archive.org, and their server can push the rarest content to your computer.

It's based on torrents, and you can easily make a content delivery system on top of this (so people can fetch data from this network).

I emailed a few archiving teams but nobody seemed interested, so I never made it.

toomuchtodo3• 10 months ago

It's a hard problem to solve, because its easy to temporarily donate resources to archiving ops via the ArchiveTeam warrior, but a long term commitment to run persistent compute and storage to mirror a chunk of the internet archive. It's why I think Filecoin isn't going to work either; very little overlap between the people who feel its important to keep these archives alive versus people who would run distributed storage to collect financial compensation for doing so.

Easier to send fiat to IA for them to invest (~$2/GB) and to pay to keep the disks spinning somewhere safe across the world.

(ia volunteer, no affiliation otherwise)

1gn155• 10 months ago

Anna's Archive has this system. This also sounds like Freenet.

uses• 10 months ago

Yeah, I did a scraping project a while back where I wanted to look back at historical snapshots. Getting the info out of Internet Archive was surprisingly difficult. I ended up using https://pypi.org/project/pywaybackup/, which helped quite a bit.

abustamam• 10 months ago

That kinda sounds like ipfs

https://ipfs.tech/

pabs35• 10 months ago

If anyone wants to help feed in more stuff, ArchiveTeam is a related volunteer group that sends data to IA:

https://archiveteam.org/

londons_explore2• 10 months ago

Presumably there needs to be some human to decide something is worth archiving to stop someone just using it as a free way to store all their holiday snaps?

pabs35• 10 months ago

ArchiveTeam members are the ones with access to start crawls of websites, everyone can request they start a crawl, usually they ask for a reason for the crawl, and most reasons mean a crawl will happen.

jonah-archive• 10 months ago

Hi, I run the datacenter/infrastructure team at the Internet Archive! We would love to see you at our various events this fall but if paying for the ticket is difficult for you, please email me (in bio) and we'll get you in (if possible).

awesomeMilou• 10 months ago

What events are we talking about here?

jackling• 10 months ago

Probably these: https://blog.archive.org/events/

NetOpWibby• 10 months ago

I would love to work for IA but openings are rare

pabs35• 10 months ago

If you are in Europe, consider Software Heritage (similar to IA but for source code) too:

https://www.softwareheritage.org/jobs/

moralestapia• 10 months ago

Hey, Q., so what's the size of the internet archive?

metalman• 10 months ago

it is large enough that I am wondering if the data captured by the actual physical magnetic charges has a heft, that a person could feel. obviously the hardware would fill a house or something, but at what point does the worlds data become a discernable physical reality, at least in theory

the_real_cher• 10 months ago

I'm betting exabyte or close maybe

textfiles2• 10 months ago

For the purposes of ballpark, between 150-200 petabytes of unique data, probably on the lowish end of that last I checked.

psychoslave2• 10 months ago

Are they distributed events all around the world of just in wherever the team is gathered (San Francisco I guess?)

By the way, thank you all the teams in IA, what you provide is such an important thing for humanity.

vettyvignesh• 10 months ago

would love technical details around this feat. ex: how you even crawl to begin with, storage, etc

WhereIsTheTruth2• 10 months ago

We all know the NSA has access to servers hosted in the U.S. How are you protecting the archive from malicious tampering? Are you using any form of immutable storage? Is it post-quantum secure?

gosub1002• 10 months ago

Why would they do that? Have you previously seen a case where they "maliciously tampered" with anyone's website?

southernplaces7• 10 months ago

Most of all, i'm curious about how you reliably and securely store or host so many archived pages. Would you mind briefly explaining such a huge undertaking? Also, total congratulations on the fantastic achievement of this. You guys are my go-to for so much information.

Edit: And how many terabytes it all amounts to.

zhynn• 10 months ago

Thanks for helping to run my favorite library on earth.

zghst• 10 months ago

A great milestone for internet history!

itsme00002• 10 months ago

Yeah but their view and download metrics are flat out wrong all the time. If they weren’t a nonprofit they’d be sued for that. But still great company a place for obsolete AWS equipment to retire.

psychoslave2• 10 months ago

What do you mean?

itsme00002• 9 months ago

I run a collection on AI. The view/download numbers are very likely the result of random botting and make no logical sense in terms of rationally what you’d expect to see. I’ll see an item downloaded 10000x normal numbers for one day etc.

As for the AWS stuff. Look at the ties between these organizations, pretty clear Amazon is basically self-dealing via a non-profit to write stuff off or have some other scheme.

FooBarWidget• 10 months ago

I'm kinda surprised IA hasn't long been shutdown by copyright chasers.

And for single page archives I tend to use archive.is nowadays. For as long as I can remember, IA has been unusably slow.

But still kudos to them for the effort.

fragmede2• 10 months ago

I very much don't get all of the show "king of the hill" being up on there.

groos• 10 months ago

It wasn't shut down but definitely hobbled after they lost the lawsuit and were forced to pull copyrighted content from their site that they used to allow signed-in users to check out an hour at a time. My visits to the site dropped 10x after this.

i_have_to_speak• 10 months ago

Is there an index of all these pages?

lofaszvanitt• 10 months ago

Would be nice to have visit statistics per domain. So people who host their live sites could determine who visits and what on archive.org under their domain vs their live site :).

lyu07282• 10 months ago

I was hoping this would include a talk by Jason Scott/@textfiles his talks are always so much fun

textfiles2• 10 months ago

Back at you.

timmy777• 10 months ago

How do you prevent government (and other people who can access the data) from rewriting history?

Do you hash them in some sort of block chain?

The inability to rewrite history will be a fantastic gift to the world.

not--felix• 10 months ago

I wonder if openai has archived more pages by now

msephton2• 10 months ago

1 trillion web pages archived is quite an achievement. But...there's no way to search them? You have to know what url your want to pull from the archive, which reduces the usefulness of the service. I'd like to search through all those trillion pages for, say, the name of an artist, or for a filename, or for image content.

qwertytyyuu• 10 months ago

That would be hell to index

citbl• 10 months ago

If it was a commercial problem, e.g. from Google, it would be solved.

The reality is that many things don't exist simply because someone isn't paid to do it.

Exuma• 10 months ago

I imagine it would be no different than current indexing strategies with a temporal aspect baked in... it would act almost like a different site, and maybe roll up the results after the fact by domain

emporas• 10 months ago

I use GPT web search, and I ask it usually to find textbooks from IA. It works really well for textbooks, but not sure about web pages.

bluebarbet3• 10 months ago

Consider the privacy implications of that. It would effectively create a parallel web where `robots.txt` counts for nothing and where it becomes - retroactively - impossible to delete one's site. Yes, there's ultimately no way to prevent it happening, given that the data is public. But to make the existing IA searchable is IMO just a terrible idea.

breakingcups• 10 months ago

Actually, I believe the IA respects robots.txt retroactively, eg. putting something on the disallow list now removes the same page scrapes from a yeaer ago from public access in teh Wayback Machine, but I'd love to be corrected on that.

1gn155• 10 months ago

(Also, consider that when you forbid such functionality, the only thing that happens is that its development becomes private. It's like DRM: it only hurts legitimate customers.)

1gn155• 10 months ago

I remember this functionality existing on Kagi or something. But I can't find it.

ks2048• 10 months ago

I wonder if Internet Archive and Common Crawl have worked together?

How does their scope or infrastructure compare?

I know they serve different purposes, but both are essentially doing similar things.

pabs35• 10 months ago

I think IA ingests crawl WARCs from CC, as well as other groups like ArchiveTeam.

BiraIgnacio• 10 months ago

Congratulations!

yupyupyups• 10 months ago

https://hoarding.support/

totaldude87• 10 months ago

So instead of scrapping all webpages, one just has to pay Archive and get all the data?

strickinato• 10 months ago

The artist who is playing at the in person celebration event this week (Sam Reider) is great! That's exciting

londons_explore2• 10 months ago

The internet archive should be striking deals with AI companies....

We'll load a truck with a copy of our complete archive if you give us a substantial donation to keep the archive going for a few more years.

If you don't agree to this deal, you can still access the archive, but it's gonna be at sluggish download speeds and take you years to get all the content.

Lapra• 10 months ago

This would destroy the goodwill that they've built up as a public good. People generally don't mind you archiving their content, but if you're selling access to that data, they aren't going to stand for it.

vivzkestrel• 10 months ago

kinda unrelated and stupid question: if we archived the version of every page on the internet every second for 10 years, would there be 1 decillion pages at the end of a decade?

philippz• 10 months ago

We should probably copy this whole thing to IPFS and put it on chain

1 Trillion Web Pages Archived

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