Internet Archive

Someone is wrong on The Internet

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The Internet Archive is a US non-profit organization and the website it runs. As the name suggests, it is a massive archive of digital text, sound, music, video and even software and webpages, some of which is from taken-down websites. Most of its content (except webpages) is either public domain (e.g. its copyright has expired or it has been created by the US government) or under a free license such as Creative Commons.

All of this means that in it you can find rare songs, obscure archive footage of nuclear explosions, technical and historical texts of almost anything imaginable, and... Moon-landing denial videos. The site also hosts a huge collection of social guidance films from the Prelinger Archives. Of course, the Zeitgeist movie is also on board, in several different variants.

Their headquarters is in a former Christian Science church, which earns them even more coolness points in RationalWiki's books.

The Wayback Machine

The Internet Archive also runs bots that systematically survey the Web and save archive copies of the pages they come by, similar to the way search engines like Google create their search indexes. Not all pages are crawled and even if a page was archived, nothing guarantees that the archived text covers all revisions to the page or the one you are looking for. The Archive's bots honor the robots.txt files, which means that they won't crawl stuff that the owner of the website doesn't want crawled. They also retroactively hide sites if the current robots.txt forbids crawling and take down page archives by the original owner's request. So, don't rely much on the existence of their copies.

The Wayback Machine refers to the subsection of the site that serves as an access point to the web archive. Just enter a URL and go. The name is a reference to the fictional Wayback Machine, a time machine used by a slightly obscure cartoon character of note during the McCarthy years.

Restrictions

The Wayback Machine originally could handle indefinite HTTP requests.

In mid-2019, the Wayback Machine has added a new cap of 20 HTTP requests per minute per IP address. When reaching the limit, it returns “429 Too Many Requests”, which resets after one minute.

This restriction was tightened down to 5 requests per minute in early October 2019, no matter the size of the page, rendering it effectively unservicable for mass archivals without the help of automated scripts and/or proxies/VPN's.

The following new error message appears when surpassing the limitation (exact quote from source, including '“are you” grammatical error):

'“Too many requests – Please email info@archive.org if you have questions about why are you being blocked”. —

Gallery

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  An Internet Archive book scanner. Sweet!

External links

• Internet Archive homepage
  • The Wayback Machine
  • Snowbeast
  • the Prelinger Archives
• Archive.is An alternative web archiving service which only process by explicit user request.
• WebCite is a different entity that will archive a publicly accessible copy of a website on demand. WebCite also honors robots.txt
• Ghost Archive is an alternative archiving entity that works wonders for Twitter links as links from Twitter tend to break other archiving services.