The Wayback Machine and Cloudflare team up to keep websites online
Hopefully, the Wayback Machine’s archives will become more robust.
The saying goes, “the internet is forever.” Now, the Wayback Machine and Cloudflare are doing their part to strengthen that adage. The two are joining forces to ensure more web pages are archived, according to a post on the Internet Archive blog.
The Wayback Machine, a project of Internet Archive, allows you to view web pages as they appeared on certain past dates. Internet Archive obtains URLs to archive a few different ways, including user submissions and “crawling” from lists of millions of sites. The partnership with Cloudflare means Internet Archive has another source for URLs -- websites that use Cloudflare’s Always Online service. Always Online creates a static image of web pages for clients in case their servers go offline. As customers enter URLs to Always Online, they will also automatically be submitted for archiving at the Wayback Machine.
There are currently more than 468 billion web pages available using the Wayback Machine, and about 1 billion URLs are archived each day, according to the blog post. It’s unclear exactly how many more URLs the Cloudflare partnership will bring, but at any rate it will back up more of the internet for public use -- which is a good thing.
