Wayback machine gets a facelift, new features

https://archive.org/web/

by anigbrowl • 13 years ago

206 77 13 years ago

archive.org

danso• 13 years ago

The "Save Page Now" feature looks great. Hopefully this cures Wikipedia of its increasing link-rot.

Also, the Supreme Court will be happy: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/24/us/politics/in-supreme-cou...

toomuchtodo5• 13 years ago

How difficult would it be to create a bookmarklet or chrome extensions to save the current page you're on to Archive.org?

Bookmarklet (thanks to sp332):

javascript:void(open('//web.archive.org/save/'+encodeURI(document.location)))

sp332• 13 years ago

Heck, the page has it half-written in the code for the "Save page now" button :)

  document.location.href='//web.archive.org/save/'+$('#web_save_url').val();

agumonkey2• 13 years ago

alternative : archive.is

fluxon• 13 years ago

Recently "vanished" by Wikipedia in response to a bot "spamming" WP with valid links to archive.is and archive.org.

http://enwp.org/WP:Archive.is_RFC

http://enwp.org/WP:Archive.is_RFC/Rotlink_email_attempt <-- conversation with archive.is operator or representative

http://enwp.org/WP:Using_Archive.is <-- "corrected"

http://enwp.org/Archive.is <-- deleted as "non notable"

mjn• 13 years ago

Here's Wikipedia's blurb on the subject, fwiw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources/Furth...

neilk3• 13 years ago

I mentored a Google Summer of Code project to do just that - every citation on Wikipedia would be forwarded to Archive.org for permanent storage, and the citation link would be modified to offer the cached version as an alternative.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Kevin_Brown/ArchiveLinks

For various reasons this didn't get completed or deployed. It's still a good idea though. IMO it should be rewritten, but it wouldn't be a lot of code. I'd love to help anyone interested.

(French Wikipedia already does this, by the way. Check out the article on France, for example - all the footnotes have a secondary link to WikiWix. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/France)

542458• 13 years ago

For various reasons this didn't get completed or deployed.

Could you list why? It looks like a sorely needed feature!

greglindahl4• 13 years ago

Alexis said (at the IA 10th Anniversary bash) that they are going to have this running very soon, using a bot to go over all of Wikipedia and insert archived links close to the dates of existing references (if available), and also capturing newly added links.

vgrichina• 13 years ago

Here's page with my bookmarklet saved by itself :) http://web.archive.org/web/20131104224622/http://www.compone...

gwern• 13 years ago

I am incredibly pleased at the save-page-now feature. Before there was a hack where using liveweb.archive.org might save a page on-demand, but you had no way of knowing. I'm adding this to my archive-bot immediately.

axefrog2• 13 years ago

Glad to see they finally got an API, however I'm a bit disappointed that it doesn't return the oldest archived date for a site, only the newest. I often need to check how long ago a site was originally archived. The API would have been very helpful for that, but the closest they provide is an option to query whether or not it was archived on a specific date, which is nowhere near as helpful.

greglindahl4• 13 years ago

Their older CDX API provides that functionality:

https://github.com/internetarchive/wayback/tree/master/wayba...

axefrog2• 13 years ago

Wow, I never knew it existed, thanks for the link!

hncommenter132• 13 years ago

Funny, I just spent some time this weekend creating a json API wrapper around the little-known Memento API that wayback offers. My idea was to make a bookmarklet that would show prior versions of the page the user was visiting. (The backend is pretty trivial, actually, but I could use some help with the javascript/dom parts.)

(The CDX API linked below is links to the actual warc/arc archive files, not the web-viewable versions.)

Here's some info on the Memento API that links to web-viewable versions of a given url: http://ws-dl.blogspot.com/2013/07/2013-07-15-wayback-machine...

http://web.archive.org/web/timemap/link/{URI} will return a text stream of urls and dates.

Edit: formatting

fmitchell0• 13 years ago

they need to fire their plastic surgeon if a font update and spacing is what is considered a facelift.

cypher5432• 13 years ago

I love the Wayback Machine (and all of Archive.org, really). I recently used it to reminisce about some old VRML-based chat communities that I frequented about 10 years ago. It had a record for every single of them.

Semaphor• 13 years ago

They still have the site I used to host pre-release Warcraft 3 servers when I was young until my parents got a call from Blizzard telling them to take it offline ;)

Harelin2• 13 years ago

Cybertown, perhaps?

cypher5432• 13 years ago

Yep! There was also GoonieTown, which didn't last very long and eventually became VR Dimension. Flatland Rover was another, but it used its own 3DML engine instead of Blaxxun Contact and VRML. Good times!

agumonkey2• 13 years ago

On a purely aesthetic side, the new input form does clash with the old menu. The ~carousel seems a bit "cpu consuming", maybe a simpler tile grid as in Windows Phone 8. That said I love the service, and the frontend is probably not the most important part of their system.

derwiki2• 13 years ago

I just launched a similar service called https://www.DailySiteSnap.com that screenshots, emails, and archives a specified web site on a daily basis. My use case is to be able to look back at any one day and see what my site looks like, since Archive.org doesn't refresh my page as often as I update it.

Disclaimer: I'm really not trying to over-market myself, but I figured readers of this thread might be interested in my project. Happy to take down this post if it's read as too spammy.

toomuchtodo5• 13 years ago

You can always package your site up in a format Archive.org can read:

http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Wget_with_WARC_ou...

http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=The_WARC_Ecosyste...

http://justsolve.archiveteam.org/wiki/WARC

http://warcreate.com/

derwiki2• 13 years ago

Thanks for the info, was unaware of ARC/WARC formats. That said, I still think many people are looking for something simpler/easier, and a daily screenshot is good enough. Particularly, it will guarantee preserved formatting as browsers continue to evolve.

d0n• 13 years ago

That would be nice, if you mailed the screenshots. But it looks like you just send a link to the screenshot.

jakobe• 13 years ago

Oh how I wish the wayback machine would ignore robots.txt... So many websites lost to history because some rookie webmaster put some misguided commands into the file without thinking about the consequences (eg. block all crawlers except google)

slouch2• 13 years ago

Robots.txt is the only way to opt-out of the Wayback Machine.

chrismonsanto• 13 years ago

A serious question: why should you be allowed to 'opt-out' of history? Is this really your call, as a website owner?

hnha• 13 years ago

no, you can just mail them.

Paul12345534• 13 years ago

I'd love to see this, even if they'd keep the content private for x number of years. Copyright runs out eventually and it would still be archived then.

aluhut• 13 years ago

We still have the NSA. They ignore everything.

jccalhoun• 13 years ago

I'm surprised that some upstart search engine hasn't made a selling point that they ignore robots.txt and claim they search the pages google doesn't or something.

ISL2• 13 years ago

If their IPs became known, they might get blocked?

greglindahl4• 13 years ago

Speaking as an upstart search engine guy (blekko) who also has a bunch of webpages and a huge robots.txt, that's a bad idea. Such a crawler would be knocking down webservers by running expensive scripts and clicking links that do bad things like deleting records from databases or reverting edits in wikis. You don't want to go there.

Cameron_D3• 13 years ago

The worst part is when a site is stored in the wayback, then the domain expires and the new owner (or squatter) has a robots.txt that blocks everything, then all the old content becomes inaccessible.

daveid• 13 years ago

They should store a history of WHOIS data for the site's domain and make separate archives for when the owner changes, I think. Also, why did anyone think that applying robots.txt retroactively is a good idea? :/

axman6• 13 years ago

The worst part of this is that it's retroactive, so adding a robots.txt that denies the wayback machine access causes the machine to delete all history of the site. This is really annoying for patent cases where the prior art is on the applicant's own website: they can go and remove the prior art so it's no longer available (which is why examiners make copies of the wayback content before making their reports).

ghaff• 13 years ago

IANAL. But, although in principle, providing an easy opt-out shouldn't really matter with respect to copyright and so forth, as a practical matter it seems as if it does--in that, if you at least vaguely care about your website not being mirrored you have an easy way to prevent it. An organization like the Internet Archive simply can't afford (in terms of either time or money) to take a more aggressive approach to mirroring.

To be more specific--short of granting the Internet Archive some sort of special library exemption--what if I were to say, create a special archive of popular cartoon strips. What's the distinction?

[EDIT: The retroactive robots.txt situation seems less clear but, like orphan works, also depends on the scenarios you care to devise.]

ersii2• 13 years ago

To be pedantic, they aren't lost. They are just unavailable until the robots.txt goes away. I'm fairly sure the Internet Archive aren't too keen on deleting things (unless you absolutely super duperly wants it gone and you're the author/owner of the data).

granttimmerman• 13 years ago

Now I have a real reason to search the Wayback machine on the Wayback machine! Then: https://web.archive.org/web/20131024095443/https://archive.o... Now: https://web.archive.org/web/20131029213051/https://archive.o...

memset• 13 years ago

In case anyone doesn't remember the old design, here is a link: https://web.archive.org/web/20131016082142/http://archive.or...

blueblob2• 13 years ago

Did you just waybackmachine the waybackmachine?

monsterix• 13 years ago

Inception! :-)

gocard• 13 years ago

Why didn't this cause an infinite loop?

memracom2• 13 years ago

They still won't let you look at pages if some domainer has aquired the domain and installed a robots.txt that disallows crawling.

They really should look at the date on the robots.txt and only apply it to pages retrieved while it is in effect.

Show us the pages from before the robots.txt became so restrictive!

powertower• 13 years ago

Disregarding whatever the rules are about this in the TOS, is there a good way to download/scrape your old archived website?

shaunpud• 13 years ago

Don't know how good they are but waybackdownloader.com seems to provide that service

learningram• 13 years ago

Let me know if you find one

slacka• 13 years ago

The new "Save Page Now" feature is great, but there is still no way to add full sites to crawl. For example, I added: http://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW.aspx

But it would take hours or days to add every article from every issue.

vbuterin• 13 years ago

They accept donations, and they even take Bitcoin: https://archive.org/donate/index.php

Be sure to send them some!

talles• 13 years ago

Thank god they didn't change much. I hate when extremely functional websites decide to 'revolutionize' their interface (I'm looking @ you Google Maps).

I love this service.

Wayback machine gets a facelift, new features

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