In the past I would fall back to WBM when something is no longer online. Though recently I've been bookmarking interesting content very rigorously and just rely on the archival feature of my bookmarking software.
Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
41–50 of 262 posts
Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
#42This 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…
There's no reason that pagerank couldn't be adapted to take into account wayback machine urls, there is a link with a url pointing at https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://news.ycombinator.com/ google could easily register that as a link to both resources - one to web.archive, the other to the site. there is also no reason why that has to become a slippery slope, if anyone is going to ask "but where do you stop!!"
After all, they did change their search to accommodate AMP. Changing it to take WebArchive into account is a) peanuts and b) is actually better for the web
Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
#43I'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…
> 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
Addendum: First, that same tool should – at the time of creating your web site / blog post / … – ask WayBackMachine to capture those links in the first place. That would actually be a very neat feature, as it would guarantee that you could always roll back the linked websites to exactly the time you linked to them on your page.
Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
#44I think the fundamental problem here is that URLs locate resources. We find the desired content by finding its location given by an address. Now what server or content lives on that address may change from time to time or may even disappear. This leads to broken links.
The problem with linking to Wayback Machine is that we are still writing archive.org URLs still linking to Wayback Machine servers. What guarantee is there that those archive.org links will not break in future?
It would have been nice if the web were designed to be content-addressable. That is, the identifier or string we use to access a content addresses the content directly, not a location where the content lives. There is good effort going on in this area in the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) project but I don't think the mainstream content providers on the Internet are going to move to IPFS anytime soon.
Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Yes. At least Archive.org isn't an evil mega corporation destroying the internet. Yet.
Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
#46But 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.
Yeah, my thoughts were more of the way Waybackmachine is funded. I don't feel comfortable sending a bunch of web traffic to them for no reason other than it being convenient. The wayback machine is a web archival project, not your personal content proxy to make sure your links don't go stale. They need our help both in funding and in action, one simple action is not to abuse their service.
Precisely my first thoughts, too. It's an archive, not a free CDN.
I hope the author of this piece considers donating and promoting donation to their readers: https://archive.org/donate/
Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
#47Good 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.
By the way the archive works, isn't the link just adding the https://web.archive.org/web/*/ before the actual link? I guess linking to both is especially important for people not knowing about the existence of archive.org, and a small convenience for everyone. But the link seems to be reversible in either direction.
Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
#48Take a look at _Robustify Your Links_.[1] It is an API and a snippet of JavaScript that saves your target HREF in one of the web archiving services and adds a decorator to the link display that offers the option to the user to view the web archive.
Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
#49In practice however, archive.org did censor content based on political preference.
Sounds plausible, but I sure would like a citation for that claim.
Re: Why I link to Wayback Machine instead of original web content
#50I'm all for Archive.org. However, using it in this way — setting up a mirror of some content and purposefuly diverting traffic to said mirror — is copyright infringement (freebooting), as it competes with the original source.