8 years ago
4
The Internet Is Failing The Website Preservation Test
The other day I was writing an article and I wanted to link to a piece I wrote when I was at CITEworld in 2013 -- just two years ago. I went searching for..
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I read a similar article on Motherboard that was critical of Google's archiving.
It's too bad that even with efforts like the Internet Archive, it would still require lots of work to index the archive and articles so meaningful searches can be done. There's also not much money in an effort like this, so we're kinda fucked if we keep going like this.
People think if it's out on the Internet it is out there forever, but this article proves that might not be the case.
There is tons of stuff that is disappearing at an alarming rate. It is honestly depressing. And with the exponentially of new content, targeted algorithms for search and copyright laws, even more difficult to find something you might have seen somewhere years ago but cannot find it anymore.
This is why it's important to download copies of articles (or even entire websites) that you like. I used to do this more often, but I've gotten lazier and the Internet Archive has gotten better at what it does. I have had moments where I've gone to look for something I saw years ago and been unable to find it, even in the Wayback Machine.
The impact of this can be seen in practically any Wikipedia article. Sources are cited, but when you go to look up the source, the link is broken. Sometimes, you can find another address for the source and re-link it, but many times it's just vaporized.
An extreme case of this was MP3.com.
MP3.com used to be the central music hub for independent artists. It was similar to what Bandcamp is now, but with charts. Well, they ran into some legal issues, and eventually wound up having to sell the site. The new owners wanted to take the site in a completely new direction, and they were going to delete all of the songs. The Internet Archive begged the new owners to allow them to take over and host the content, but they were just not interested. So all of those thousands and thousands of songs got deleted.