internet archive tours

Internet Archive

San Francisco

Follow trails of deleted White House tweets, lost Grateful Dead tapes and defunct Nintendo gamer magazines to this 1923 Greek Revival landmark. In a former Christian Science church, the nonprofit Internet Archive hosts more than 30 petabytes (that's 300 million gigabytes) of bygone media, and counting. The archive is run by 100-plus dedicated volunteer archivists, depicted in ceramic sculptures by artist Nuala Creed.

Check the website for Friday visits (1pm to 2pm) and tours, often led by founder, internet pioneer and Alexa inventor Brewster Kahle.

300 Funston Ave

Get In Touch

415-561-6767

https://​www​.archive​.org​/

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Introductory Tour of Archive.org and its Collections

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit library founded to gather knowledge in digital formats and make it available to everyone in the world for free. But 80+ million objects (books, web pages, TV, movies, radio, concerts, etc.) can be a daunting library to navigate.

This video provides:

• An overview of the major collections on archive.org and how to use them
• Tips for how to efficiently find what you’re looking for
• Pointers for where to find more information on your own

Make sure you’re ready to take notes, there’s a lot of information to share!

Root Simple

Low tech home tech, inside the internet archive: a meat world tour.

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Living, as we all do, in a fog bank of texts, emails, social media updates and more it can seem as Marx put it, that “all that is solid melts into thin air.” Thus, visiting the physical headquarters of the Internet Archive , is somewhat contradictory. Yes, in fact, you can ride the #38r Geary bus to see a website. We forget that the “virtual” things in our lives exist in the real world of servers, cables and cooling systems.

The Internet Archive, founded in 1996, is a “non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.” I’ve used it many times for research and even built a fence based on images in one of the books contained in their Building Technology Heritage Library . In addition to digitizing books, records and other media they maintain the Wayback Machine which archives a searchable selection of websites.

In 2009 they purchased a massive Christian Science church building at the corner of  Funston and Clement in the Richmond district of San Francisco. The paradoxical physical presence of the Archive is as much a story about the virtual as it is about the decline and repurposing of old-school religious institutions but that story will need to be told in another blog post.

A group of publishers did not agree with this arrangement and sued. The judge agreed and the injunction will remove a significant number of the books they currently lend online . Concurrently, a group of record labels have sued to stop the Internet Archive’s efforts to digitize and make available recordings on 78rpm records . Parsing the dialectical relationship between the value of public domain material and the rights of creators and publishers is beyond my pay grade. Let’s just say it’s complicated and made more so by technology and the huge data models gestating in the, perhaps over-hyped, world of AI.

If you come by the archive at 1pm on Friday you’ll get a tour, often led by the founder Brewster Kahle . Kahle was on vacation so our tour was capably led by gentleman whose name I failed to get, unfortunately. After explaining the history of the building, our tour guide showed us the contraption they use to digitize books. He noted that the majority of the books they digitize are sent to the Philippines and digitized with cheaper labor.

You can donate books and other materials to the Archive . They have an app that will tell you if they need a particular item and will sometimes pay for shipping.

The Internet Archive is a throwback to the heady, more optimistic days of the Internet familiar to those of us older than 50 who can remember things like Mondo 2000 and rave fueled techno-optimism. Everything will be free! Undeniably useful, the Internet Archive contains many, entertaining quirks such as Ted Nelson’s collection of vintage junk mail and their annual celebration of Public Domain Day when materials lapse into free use.

Ceramic installation by Nuala Creed.

If you’re in San Francisco the free tour is well worth it if just to meet the celebrity tech tour guides and the rotating art installations. And you can have lunch afterwards on Clement Street, sometimes known as “the other Chinatown” (I’d add less touristy Chinatown) and then go buy a book at Green Apple if you have lingering copyright guilt.

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Related posts.

Google Search

Google will now link to the internet archive to add more context to search results.

Rolling out starting today, Google Search results will now directly link to The Internet Archive to add historical context for the links in your results.

Google Search makes it easy to find information, but occasionally you need historical context for a page that may have been recently updated. That was previously possible to a certain extent through cached pages in Search, but that functionality was removed earlier this year .

Starting today, though, Google Search will make it possible to see a whole lot more historical context for a link.

Google has partnered with The Internet Archive, a non-profit research library that, in part, stores and preserves massive portions of the web to be easily referenced later. This is done through the “Wayback Machine” which can show a website or specific page as it existed on a previous date.

Through this new partnership, Google will link directly to The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for pages that you find in Search.

Google says in a statement to 9to5Google :

We know that many people, including those in the research community, value being able to see previous versions of webpages when available. That’s why we’ve added links to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to our ‘About this page’ feature, to give people quick context and make this helpful information easily accessible through Search.

In a post regarding the announcement, The Internet Archive celebrates that these results are now “just a click away” in Google Search and adds that this partnership “underscores the importance of web archiving.”

To access The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine links through Google Search you’ll need to click the three-dots menu button that appears alongside all search results and then tap on “More about this page.”

This new feature is still actively rolling out, but Google was able to provide an image to show what the integration looks like.

If you’re seeing this live in your search results, let us know in the comments below.

More on Google Search:

• Google Search redesigns web stopwatch and timer
• Google Search AI Overviews rolling out to six new countries, adding more prominent links
• Google Maps and Search will show wildfire alerts in more parts of Europe and Africa

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Internet Archive Blogs

A blog from the team at archive.org, new feature alert: access archived webpages directly through google search.

In a significant step forward for digital preservation, Google Search is now making it easier than ever to access the past. Starting today, users everywhere can view archived versions of webpages directly through Google Search, with a simple link to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine .

How It Works

To access this new feature, conduct a search on Google as usual. Next to each search result, you’ll find three dots—clicking on these will bring up the “About this Result” panel. Within this panel, select “More About This Page” to reveal a link to the Wayback Machine page for that website.

Through this direct link, you’ll be able to view previous versions of a webpage via the Wayback Machine, offering a snapshot of how it appeared at different points in time. 

A Commitment to Preservation

At the Internet Archive, our mission is to provide, “Universal Access to All Knowledge.” The Wayback Machine, one of our best-known services, provides access to billions of archived webpages, ensuring that the digital record remains accessible for future generations.

As Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, explains:

“The web is aging, and with it, countless URLs now lead to digital ghosts. Businesses fold, governments shift, disasters strike, and content management systems evolve—all erasing swaths of online history. Sometimes, creators themselves hit delete, or bow to political pressure. Enter the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine: for more than 25 years, it’s been preserving snapshots of the public web. This digital time capsule transforms our “now-only” browsing into a journey through internet history. And now, it’s just a click away from Google search results, opening a portal to a fuller, richer web—one that remembers what others have forgotten.”

This collaboration with Google underscores the importance of web archiving and expands the reach of the Wayback Machine, making it even easier for users to access and explore archived content. However, the link to archived webpages will not be available in instances where the rights holder has opted out of having their site archived or if the webpage violates content policies.

For more information about the Wayback Machine and how you can explore the web’s history, visit https://web.archive.org/ .

One thought on “ New Feature Alert: Access Archived Webpages Directly Through Google Search ”

another hope for Archive.org

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Upcoming Events

Book talk: attack from within by barbara mcquade, doors open 2024: go behind-the-scenes at the physical archive, escaping the memory hole.