{"id":1074,"date":"2015-01-29T08:13:55","date_gmt":"2015-01-29T14:13:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/library\/?p=1074"},"modified":"2015-01-29T08:14:50","modified_gmt":"2015-01-29T14:14:50","slug":"tbt-internet-archive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/library\/tbt-internet-archive\/","title":{"rendered":"#tbt – Internet Archive"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article originally appeared in The Message<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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\"never<\/a>Google wrote its mission statement in 1999, a year after launch, setting the course for the company\u2019s next decade:<\/p>\n

\u201cGoogle\u2019s mission is to organize the world\u2019s information and make it universally accessible and useful.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For years, Google\u2019s mission included the preservation of the past<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

In 2001, Google made their first acquisition, the Deja archives. The largest collection of Usenet archives, Google relaunched it as Google Groups<\/strong>, supplemented with archived messages going back to 1981.<\/p>\n

In 2004, Google Books<\/strong> signaled the company\u2019s intention to scan every known book, partnering with libraries and developing its own book scanner capable of digitizing 1,000 pages per hour.<\/p>\n

In 2006, Google News Archive<\/strong> launched, with historical news articles dating back 200 years. In 2008, they expanded it to include their own digitization efforts, scanning newspapers that were never online.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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In the last five years, starting around 2010, the shifting priorities of Google\u2019s management left these archival projects in limbo, or abandoned entirely.<\/p>\n

For years, Google\u2019s mission included the preservation of the past.<\/p>\n

In 2001, Google made their first acquisition, the Deja archives. The largest collection of Usenet archives, Google relaunched it as Google Groups, supplemented with archived messages going back to 1981.<\/p>\n

In 2004, Google Books signaled the company\u2019s intention to scan every known book, partnering with libraries and developing its own book scanner capable of digitizing 1,000 pages per hour.<\/p>\n

In 2006, Google News Archive launched, with historical news articles dating back 200 years. In 2008, they expanded it to include their own digitization efforts, scanning newspapers that were never online.<\/p>\n

In the last five years, starting around 2010, the shifting priorities of Google\u2019s management left these archival projects in limbo, or abandoned entirely.<\/p>\n

After a series of redesigns, Google Groups is effectively dead for research purposes. The archives, while still online, have no means of searching by date.<\/p>\n

Google News Archives are dead, killed off in 2011, now directing searchers to just use Google.<\/p>\n

Google Books is still online, but curtailed their scanning efforts in recent years, likely discouraged by a decade of legal wrangling still in appeal. The official blog stopped updating in 2012 and the Twitter account\u2019s been dormant since February 2013.<\/p>\n

Even Google Search, their flagship product, stopped focusing on the history of the web. In 2011, Google removed the Timeline view letting users filter search results by date, while a series of major changes to their search ranking algorithm increasingly favored freshness over older pages from established sources. (To the detriment of some.)<\/p>\n

Two months ago, Larry Page said the company\u2019s outgrown its 14-year-old mission statement. Its ambitions have grown, and its priorities have shifted.<\/p>\n

Google in 2015 is focused on the present and future. Its social and mobile efforts, experiments with robotics and artificial intelligence, self-driving vehicles and fiberoptics.<\/p>\n

As it turns out, organizing the world\u2019s information isn\u2019t always profitable. Projects that preserve the past for the public good aren\u2019t really a big profit center. Old Google knew that, but didn\u2019t seem to care.<\/p>\n

The desire to preserve the past died along with 20% time, Google Labs, and the spirit of haphazard experimentation.<\/p>\n

Google may have dropped the ball on the past, but fortunately, someone was there to pick it up.<\/p>\n

\"internet<\/a>The Internet Archive is mostly known for archiving the web, a task the San Francisco-based nonprofit has tirelessly done since 1996, two years before Google was founded.<\/p>\n

The Wayback Machine now indexes over 435 billion webpages going back nearly 20 years, the largest archive of the web.<\/p>\n

For most people, it ends there. But that\u2019s barely scratching the surface.<\/p>\n

Most don\u2019t know that the Internet Archive also hosts:<\/p>\n