Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren vog Obam here. If a tree falls
Speaker 1: in a forest doesn't really make a sound? And if
Speaker 1: a website changes overnight, did its previous homepage ever really
Speaker 1: exist in the first place. Because so much of our
Speaker 1: world is increasingly digital and ephemeral, it's not just a
Speaker 1: philosophical question, it's also a simple matter of history. That's
Speaker 1: why the way Back Machine, which features step shots of
Speaker 1: websites as they age and change, is such a fascinating
Speaker 1: glimpse into the dusty corners of the web. The way
Speaker 1: Back Machine is a massive digital archive meant to preserve
Speaker 1: web pages that would otherwise be permanently lost to time.
Speaker 1: Without this horde of data, every time a page was
Speaker 1: updated or deleted, it would simply vanish, as if it
Speaker 1: had never been there. Mark Graham, the director of the
Speaker 1: way Back Machine, noted in Entrepreneur article that the average
Speaker 1: life expectancy of a web page is about a hundred days.
Speaker 1: There are a multitude of reasons why these web pages disappear.
Speaker 1: A site creators move on to other projects, web hosting
Speaker 1: companies go bankrupt, or maybe the pages moved or replaced
Speaker 1: with new data and content. One place you may have
Speaker 1: seen the way back machines work. More than eleven million
Speaker 1: web pages referenced in Wikipedia articles have gone bad over
Speaker 1: the years. In other words, they now return a four
Speaker 1: oh four or page not found error because they've been archived.
Speaker 1: In the way Back Machine. Technicians there were able to
Speaker 1: edit those Wikipedia pages, so the references now point to
Speaker 1: archived versions of those defunct u r l s. The
Speaker 1: way Back Machine is the brainchild of Brewster Kale and
Speaker 1: Bruce Giliad, who also founded the Internet Archive, which is
Speaker 1: a digital library of websites, books, audio and video recordings,
Speaker 1: and software. Both projects are San Francisco based nonprofits. Kale
Speaker 1: and Gilliatt also created Alexa Internet, which analyzes web traffic
Speaker 1: patterns and was sold to Amazon. Project director Graham said
Speaker 1: via email they with Kale and Gilad, had started to
Speaker 1: archive web pages in and in two thousand one launched
Speaker 1: the way Back Machine to support discovery and playback of
Speaker 1: those archived web resources and yes, the name was inspired
Speaker 1: by the nineteen sixties cartoon series The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.
Speaker 1: In the cartoon, the way Back w A B a c.
Speaker 1: Machine was a plot device used to transport the characters Mr.
Speaker 1: Peabody and Sherman back in time to visit important events
Speaker 1: in human history. In a world where there are more
Speaker 1: than one point seven billion websites, with the number climbing
Speaker 1: dramatically by the day, how can anyone possibly hope to
Speaker 1: catalog so many web pages? The way Back Machine uses
Speaker 1: what are called crawlers, a type of software that automatically
Speaker 1: moves through the web, taking snapshots of billions of sites
Speaker 1: as it goes. Some of the process is automated, but
Speaker 1: many of the requests are generated manually by a network
Speaker 1: of librarians who prioritize certain types of sites that they
Speaker 1: think are important to preserve for posterity and for future generations.
Speaker 1: The crawlers don't capture every iteration of sites. The frequency
Speaker 1: of snapshots differs by these sites importance. Very significant sites
Speaker 1: might be recorded every few hours. Others might be logged
Speaker 1: weeks or months apart. Most aren't logged at all, So
Speaker 1: don't worry that embarrassing fan website you made in high
Speaker 1: school is probably long gone by now. The way Back
Speaker 1: Machine aims to capture snapshots of important content, say the
Speaker 1: breaking news headlines created by major media companies, Furthermore, it
Speaker 1: doesn't necessarily recreate the entire site, and it doesn't preserve
Speaker 1: the data in a way that you'd experience it with
Speaker 1: your browser. It may only capture a few images of
Speaker 1: a few pages and not preserve content that's linked to
Speaker 1: other sites outside of the domain. But on a more
Speaker 1: practical level, you've probably had the experience of clicking on
Speaker 1: a link on a web page and getting a four
Speaker 1: oh four or page dot found notation, and now you're
Speaker 1: wondering what was on the page originally. That's where the
Speaker 1: way back machine can help. To use the way back machine,
Speaker 1: go to archive dot org slash web type the ur
Speaker 1: L of the site you want to investigate in the
Speaker 1: browse history search bar, and the results you'll see a
Speaker 1: chronological barograph that shows how many times the site was
Speaker 1: crawled and saved in a given year. Click the year
Speaker 1: and blow You'll see a twelve month calendar with various
Speaker 1: dates highlighted. Blue highlights mean the site was saved properly,
Speaker 1: red means it was not. Click one of the highlighted
Speaker 1: dates and the site stop shots will appear. Click on
Speaker 1: one of those snapshots, and just like that, you've traveled
Speaker 1: back in time to that older version of the site.
Speaker 1: If you want to make sure that a particular site
Speaker 1: is recorded to the archive, you can do so manually
Speaker 1: use the save page now option to save a specific
Speaker 1: page once, but realize that doing so only saves that
Speaker 1: one page, not an entire website, and it doesn't guarantee
Speaker 1: that the site will be crawled in the future. And
Speaker 1: if content owners want their material excluded from the Wayback Machine,
Speaker 1: they can submit a request by sending an email to
Speaker 1: info at archive dot org. Graham's as that the most
Speaker 1: amazing thing about the way Back Machine is that it
Speaker 1: exists at all, and how much of the public web
Speaker 1: it's able to preserve. Given that it has such a
Speaker 1: small budget and team, they do use volunteers as well,
Speaker 1: he said, with more support, we can do an even
Speaker 1: better job of backing up more of the public web.
Speaker 1: Funding for the Internet Archive and the way Back Machine
Speaker 1: comes from a combination of earned income from our subscription
Speaker 1: based web arcing service archive it dot org, major donors
Speaker 1: and foundations, as well as contributions from more than a
Speaker 1: hundred thousand individual donors. We love being able to give
Speaker 1: away our services and don't run ads on our web pages.
Speaker 1: He's sure that the way Back Machine will become even
Speaker 1: more important in the future. Quote. As the nature of
Speaker 1: how people communicate and share information evolves, so too we
Speaker 1: will need to build technologies, processes, and partnerships to continue
Speaker 1: to do the best job we can to preserve as
Speaker 1: much of this public information as possible. All in support
Speaker 1: of the way Back machines mission to help make the
Speaker 1: web more useful and reliable, and in particular, to help
Speaker 1: support your lists, activists, academics, historians, researchers, and the general public.
Speaker 1: Today's episode was written by Nathan Chandler and produced by
Speaker 1: Tyler Clay. Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio's
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works. For more on this and lots of
Speaker 1: other well archived topics, visit our home planet how stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com and for more podcasts for my heart
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