Inside the old church where one trillion webpages are stored – CNN Business

Inside the old church where one trillion webpages are being saved

By Hadas Gold, Updated 23 hr ago

See inside the old San Francisco church that houses nearly all of the internet’s history…

San Francisco  —  Just blocks from the Presidio of San Francisco, the national park at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge, stands a gleaming white building, its façade adorned with eight striking gothic columns.

But what was once the home of a Christian Scientist church, is now the holy grail of Internet history — the Internet Archive, a non-profit library run by a group of software engineers and librarians, who for nearly 30 years have been saving the web one page at a time.

Inside the stained-glass-adorned sanctuary, the sounds of church sermons have been replaced by the hum of servers, where the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine preserves web pages.

The Wayback Machine, a tool used by millions every day, has proven critical for academics and journalists searching for historical information on what corporations, people and governments have published online in the past, long after their websites have been updated or changed.

For many, the Wayback Machine is like a living history of the internet, and it just logged its trillionth page last month.

Archiving the web is more important and more challenging than ever before. The White House in January ordered vast amounts of government webpages to be taken down. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is blurring the line between what’s real and what’s artificially generated — in some ways replacing the need to visit websites entirely. And more of the internet is now hidden behind paywalls or tucked in conversations with AI chatbots.

It’s the Internet Archive’s job to figure out how to preserve it all.

The Internet Archive also preserves music, television, newspapers, videogames and books, which archivists digitize page by page using bespoke machines. CNN

“We are here to try to provide a record of what happened, so that people can learn and build on that to build a better future, or to build new ideas that are worthy of being in the (Internet Archive’s) library,” said Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle.

The internet’s library

Kahle created the archive in 1996 when a year’s worth of saved pages could fit on about 2 terabytes worth of hard drives, the amount of storage you can get today in an iPhone. Now, the archive is saving closer to 150 terabytes, or hundreds of millions worth of web pages, per day.

Kahle is the driving force and personality behind the archive, with the exuberance and energy of your favorite science teacher and like an evangelist whose religion is libraries and technology. Sitting for an interview on the original wooden pews of the church, Kahle said he was inspired to purchase the building because it resembles the group’s logo. But more importantly, he said it’s a symbol of permanence and a reference to the Library of Alexandria in Egypt.

“That was the first time somebody tried to go and collect everything ever written by humans,” Kahle said. “Of course, now that place is the internet, and the Internet Archive serves the whole internet as a library.”

Brewster Kahle created the archive in 1996 when a year’s worth of saved pages could fit on about 2 terabytes worth of hard drives, the amount of storage you can get today in an iPhone. CNN

The Wayback Machine tool does more than just screenshot the page. It also saves the technical architecture — the HTML, CSS, JavaScript codes and more — so that it can attempt to “replay the page as it existed” even if the server is no longer functioning, said Wayback Machine Director Mark Graham.

The rise of artificial intelligence and AI chatbots means the Internet Archive is changing how it records the history of the internet. In addition to web pages, the Internet Archive now captures AI-generated content, like ChatGPT answers and those summaries that appear at the top of Google search results.

 Referred by: Library Link of the Day
http://www.tk421.net/librarylink/  (archive, rss, subscribe options)

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