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Comment by luizfelberti | Hacker News Reader

> Then a couple of weeks ago, added [direct] links to the Wayback Machine

Hopefully they are also making substantial donations to the Internet Archive, since they will be directing a lot of traffic into it and basically using their infrastructure as a feature on their main product...

EDIT:

Apparently they are collaborating but there are not much details [0]

[0] https://blog.archive.org/2024/09/11/new-feature-alert-access...

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>Hopefully they are also making substantial donations to the Internet Archive, since they will be directing a lot of traffic into it and basically using their infrastructure as a feature on their main product

WebArchive link is hidden so deep in the "About the source" page that vast majority of Google users won't even know that it exists.

There is excellent browser extension called Web Archives[0] that hooks all major web archiving services e.g. Archive.is, Wayback Machine and others in one place.

[0] https://github.com/dessant/web-archives

No kidding:

Click a result's three dots menu. Underneath all the main call to action buttons (Visit, share, save) is a Wikipedia description of the site. Underneath that is a "More about this page" button. On this separate page is a description of the company, social media links, reviews, generic results for the company, and, finally, some 1100px down, "See previous versions on Internet Archive's Wayback Machine" in a 14px font: https://imgur.com/a/IMgVDpV

What's the ETA for this being removed due to lack of use...

That’s probably a good thing, people who really do research old archived stuff will dig and find it but others who casually click won’t bring archive.org to its knees

It'd be absolutely foolish if the agreement wasn't contingent on funding. I assume the reason it's not explicitly stated was some sort of NDA (since IA is also involved in turmoil and Google doesn't want to be part of that).

I wouldn't designate IP-holders attacking the longterm memory of mankind as turmoil. Digital dementia or ip-alzheimers seems more fitting.

Give a man a hypothetical infinite amount of meals and he will poison the village well so there will never be fishing again.

>> NDA

Non-disclosure agreement

I hope Google is NOT going to be a significant source of funding for the Internet Archive. Because I want to trust Wayback Machine and the Internet Archive to be unbiased.

Google likes to influence search results, hiding ones it doesn't like, and elevating those that the Company supports. Wayback Machine has been very reliable so far, I hope it stays that way.

Generally speaking, the Wayback Machine is not searchable in the fashion that Google is, there isn't a scale to put the thumb on.

(There are some tiny subsets which are rudimentarily full-text searchable; and some efforts to make domains findable. But nothing remotely like even Google 1.0 mapping URIs to organic terms.)

Which is really unfortunate because a lot of useful information is now essentially unfindable unless you know where it is. Maybe someone should start crawling and indexing the internet archive.

And no, the IA is already not an impartial archive: https://archive.org/post/1126216/kiwi-farms-removed-from-way...

IA needs an alternative - an independent backup archive - more than it needs funding. Unless IA funding exceeds the entire US copyright lobbying industry there is always a chance they will cease to exist without enough notice to save the data somewhere else.

There is also the matter what IA will be able to archive. The the machine learning gold rush more and more site operators see dollar bills in front of them and are restricting who can crawl their content. Google is in a special position here because almost no one can affort not to be crawled by Google which is what made their cache especially valuable in addition to the IA.

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