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Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

hawaiigentech.com

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Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#21

Post by bartread »

I'm not sure I'm a fan of this because it just turns WayBackMachine into another content silo. It's called the world wide web for a reason, and this isn't helping.

I can see it for corporate sites where they change content, remove pages, and break links without a moment's consideration.

But for my personal site, for example, I'd much rather you link to me directly rather than content in WayBackMachine. Apart from anything else linking to WayBackMachine only drives traffic to WayBackMachine, not my site. Similarly, when I link to other content, I want to show its creators the same courtesy by linking directly to their content rather than WayBackMachine.

What I can see, and I don't know if it exists yet (a quick search suggests perhaps not), is some build task that will check all links and replace those that are broken with links to WayBackMachine, or (perhaps better) generate a report of broken links and allow me to update them manually just in case a site or two happen to be down when my build runs.

I think it would probably need to treat redirects like broken links given the prevalence of corporate sites where content is simply removed and redirected to the homepage, or geo-locked and redirected to the homepage in other locales (I'm looking at you and your international warranty, and access to tutorials, Fender. Grr.).

I also probably wouldn't run it on every build because it would take a while, but once a week or once a month would probably do it.

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#22

Post by johannes1234321 »

outsomnia wrote: post #16

This is a bad idea... In the worst case one might write a cool article and get two hits, one noticing it exists, and the other from the archive service. After that it might go viral, but the author may have given up by then. The author is losing out on inbound links so google thinks their site is irrelevant and gives it a bad pagerank. All you need to do is get archive.org to take a copy at the time, you can always a…

One can also do it similar to Wikipedia references sections, which links to the original and the memento in the archive. (Once the bot notices it's gone)

Additional benefit: Some edits are good (addendums, typo corrections etc.)

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#23

Post by bartread »

ethanwillis wrote: post #20
outsomnia wrote: post #16

This is a bad idea... In the worst case one might write a cool article and get two hits, one noticing it exists, and the other from the archive service. After that it might go viral, but the author may have given up by then. The author is losing out on inbound links so google thinks their site is irrelevant and gives it a bad pagerank. All you need to do is get archive.org to take a copy at the time, you can always a…

Google shouldn't be the center of the Web. They could also easily determine where the archive link is pointing to and not penalize. But I guess making sure we align with Google's incentives is more important than just using the Web.

> Google shouldn't be the center of the Web.

I agree, but are you suggesting it's going to be better if WayBackMachine is?

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#24

Post by sseneca »

romwell wrote: post #3

Good idea, by why not both (i.e. link to a webpage, and to the Archive)? Linking to Archive only makes Archive a single point of failure.

Yes, this makes the most sense in my opinion:

Check out [this link](https://...) ([archived](https://...))

This can also help in the event of a "hug of death"

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#26

Post by mcv »

bartread wrote: post #21

I'm not sure I'm a fan of this because it just turns WayBackMachine into another content silo. It's called the world wide web for a reason, and this isn't helping. I can see it for corporate sites where they change content, remove pages, and break links without a moment's consideration. But for my personal site, for example, I'd much rather you link to me directly rather than content in WayBackMachine. Apart from any…

Would be nice if there's an automatic way to have a link revert to the Wayback Machine once the original link stops working. I can't think of an easy way to do that, though.

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#28

Post by 8bitsrule »

Gotta completely agree ... for anything you need to be stable and available.

I've been building lists of -reference- URLs for over a decade ... and the ones aimed at Archive.org (are slower to load, but) are much more reliable.

Saved Wayback URLs contain the original site URL. It's really easy to check it to see if the site has deteriorated (usually it has). If it's gotten better ... it's easy to update your saved WB link.

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#29

Post by moonchild »

Lex-2008 wrote: post #13
cornedor wrote: post #4

But how certain is the future of WayBackMachine, when disaster strikes, all your links are dead. On the other hand, the original links can still be read from the url, so the original reference is not completely gone.

WayBackMachine alternative, archive.is, has an option to download zip archive of HTML with images and CSS (but no JS) - this way you can preserve and host a copy of original webpage on your own website

Or just wget -rk...

Mirroring a website isn't so hard that you need a service to do it for you. Your browser even has such a function; try ctrl-s.

Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content

#30

Post by dredmorbius »

cornedor wrote: post #4

But how certain is the future of WayBackMachine, when disaster strikes, all your links are dead. On the other hand, the original links can still be read from the url, so the original reference is not completely gone.

INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK:

The INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK project (also known as IA.BAK or IABAK) is a combined experiment and research project to back up the Internet Archive's data stores, utilizing zero infrastructure of the Archive itself (save for bandwidth used in download) and, along the way, gain real-world knowledge of what issues and considerations are involved with such a project. Started in April 2015, the project already has dozens of contributors and partners, and has resulted in a fairly robust environment backing up terabytes of the Archive in multiple locations around the world.

https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE....

Snapshots from 2002 and 2006 are preserved in Alexandria, Egypt. I hope there's good fire suppression.

https://www.bibalex.org/isis/frontend/archive/archive_web.as...

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