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Deleting a web page is similar to deleting a file from your computer -- once it's tossed in the trash, it's pretty difficult to retrieve. But unlike your computer hard drive, the World Wide Web is a public space, and even though a web page's creator has deleted the page, someone out there may have saved it for posterity. Founded in 1996 as a nonprofit organization, the Internet Archive is "building a digital library of Internet sites" to preserve web pages and other electronic cultural artifacts. As of October 2001, the archive contained 10 billion pages -- that's over 100 terabytes of data. The archive is growing at a rate of 12 terabytes per month. On the front page of the archive you
can access the Wayback Machine. Simply type in the URL of a web page, click the "Take Me Back!" button, and the resulting page will display a list of links to past versions of that web page. For example, we put ask.yahoo.com into the Wayback Machine and turned up snapshots of past Ask Yahoo! columns from late 2000 and through 2001. But this search shows how the Wayback Machine and the Internet Archive as a whole are not perfect. Ask Yahoo! celebrated it's third birthday in 2001, and the Wayback Machine has nothing from our first year. Similarly, a search for the cutting-edge, now-defunct web zine www.word.com gives us lots of pages from 2000 and 2001 -- after
the site had shut down. The Wayback Machine has only a few pages from word.com's earlier years and no pages dating back to word.com's beginnings in 1995 or 1994. While a number of Internet history sites exist, nothing comes close to documenting the Web's hypertext past like the Internet Archive. So, pop your favorite dead URL into the Wayback Machine and see the web pages turn in their graves!
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