Google Should Offer Searchable Archives
By
Staten Island, NY Posted: 2/21/2015 1:00:00 AM
Unless a large company like Google dedicates resources to archiving the Web, much of today's history will be erased.
If you want to get a good understanding of what life was like 100 years ago, you could read newspapers from that era. After reading every newspaper for any given month in sequence, you can immerse yourself in the stories and opinions of the people who lived through it.
Each day more people get their news from online news sites, blogs, videos and podcasts and social media than any other form of media. The fact is, there is more information produced online today than in print.
Although printed materials are not going to vanish any time soon, if we don't make a serious effort to archive the Web, vast amounts of history will be lost.
A while back, a non-profit organization called Archive.Org decided to take on the task of archiving as much of the Web as they could. The trouble is, they are a small non-profit organization and the Web is growing much faster than their limited resources can ever handle.
As of right now, the majority of funding has come from: Alexa Internet, HP Computer, The Kahle/Austin Foundation, Prelinger Archives, National Science Foundation, Library of Congress, LizardTech, Sloan Foundation and Individual contributors.
As you look at the list of companies who are helping to fund this monumental task, one name is conspicuously absent... Google.
Meanwhile they are one of the few companies who have the resources to build an effective archive. Unlike Archive.Org, they currently crawl and index almost every publicly available web page. Popular news sites are crawled multiple times each day and even the smallest websites are crawled every few weeks.
The bottom line, at any given moment, Google has almost every word on every web page in the world in their databases. That information should be archived and made public for people to browse and search. This would allow somebody to search Google and see results based upon a selected timeframe, much like Apple's Time Machine which lets you see older versions of your files.
If Google doesn't take on this task, they should at least join the list of companies who are supporting Archive.org so that future historians will be able to get a better picture of life in our generation.
Lastly, I know I'm leaving out Yahoo, Bing (Microsoft) and other search engines. The reason I've singled out Google is because they are the dominant player in this market by a wide margin. Microsoft and Yahoo could remove search from their business models at any time and still survive, but search is still the core of Google's long term strategy.
Joe Crescenzi, Founder
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