What ArchiveTeam mainly does is provide hand-made scripts to aggressively archive specific websites that are about to die, with a prioritization for things the community deems most endangered and most important. They provide a bot you can run to grab these scripts automatically and run them on your own hardware, to join the volunteer effort.

This is in contrast to the Wayback Machine's builtin crawler, which is just a broad spectrum internet crawler without any specific rules, prioritizations, or supplementary link lists.

For example, one ArchiveTeam project had the goal to save as many obscure Wikis as possible, using the MediaWiki export feature rather than just grabbing page contents directly. This came in handy for thousands of wikis that were affected by Miraheze's disk failure and happened to have backups created by this project. Thanks to the domain-specific technique, the backups were high-fidelity enough that many users could immediately restart their wiki on another provider as if nothing happened.

They also try to "graze the rate limit" when a website announces a shutdown date and there isn't enough time to capture everything. They actively monitor for error responses and adjust the archiving rate accordingly, to get as much as possible as fast as possible, hopefully without crashing the backend or inadvertently archiving a bunch of useless error messages.

> Like they kinda seem like an unnecessary middle-man between the archive and archivee

They are the middlemen that collects the data to be archived.

In this example the archivee (goo.gl/Alphabet) is simply shutting the service down and has no interest in archiving it. Archive.org is willing to host the data, but only if somebody brings it to them. Archiveteam writes and organises crawlers to collect the data and send it to Archive.org

Archive Team is carrying books in a bucket brigade out of the burning library. Archive.org is giving them a place to put the books they saved.

ArchiveTeam delegates tasks to volunteers and themselves running the Archive Warrior VM, which does the actual archiving. The resultant archives are then centralized by ArchiveTeam and uploaded to the Internet Archive.

(Source: ran a Warrior)

> What exactly is archiveteam's contribution? I don't fully understand.

If Internet Archive is a library, ArchiveTeam is people who run around collecting stuff, and gives it to the library for safe keeping. Stuff that are estimated/announced to be disappearing/removed soon tends to be focused too.

They gathered up the links for processing, because Google doesn't just give a list of short links in use. So the links have to be brute-forcefully gathered first.

liability shield