WyzGuys Tech Talk

Bob says:  Information stored on paper, papyrus, clay tables, and stone have withstood the ravages of time for millennia. How long will the vast quantities of information we are creating continue to be accessible in the future. The problem with electronic information is not the storage media itself (although that’s part of the problem), it is the changing file formats we use to store the information. Do you have a trove of Super 8MM movie film full of family memories, or better yet, VHS magnetic tape. Old WordPerfect documents? Lotus 123 spreadsheets? How will we retrieve this information in the future?

By Gary Braley

Do you think everything you have seen on the Internet is still there? If so, where and if not, why not? Let’s say you search for that fabulous article you found five years ago.

The answer as you can imagine is not simple. If everything we see online is permanent the Internet/World Wide Web would become the ultimate junk yard. You would be able to see not only the current Target Christmas catalog but every Christmas catalog produced for the last twenty-five years. Let’s look at how information is stored on the Web. Remember the Internet is a collection of thousands of computers that host software called the World Wide Web. The information is stored in several forms on the Web.

Much of what we see comes from databases – the Target catalogs for example. That information is updated continuously so we only see products that are currently sold by the company and only the latest catalog. For many years while I was consulting I had a static web page describing the services I offered, articles I had written and listing the over two hundred clients I had worked with from 1978 through 2005. I changed the page from time to time to add new clients or more recent articles. When I stopped  consulting I did not need the page and it was deleted but did it disappear? Yes and no.

The original page WWW.Braley.com was erased but it was not gone forever. Someone at the Wayback Machine/Web Archive had the foresight to save a copy in a permanent archive. But because my page and many others like it were changed regularly this service had to save updated copies every few months! That means there are more than a hundred copies of Braley.com available online today – one captured every few months for over twenty years! To make it easy you can just use the following links to see my old home page and my client list from 2003. Notice the Wayback Machine actually uses the address Archive.org.

Home Page
https://web.archive.org/web/20030219130028/http://www.braley.com/

Client List
https://web.archive.org/web/20030201115517/http://braley.com/braley/clients/index.htm

Let me know how it works.

Ooops – I just remembered “Hidden Files”. That exciting topic will have to wait till next month!
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As always drop me a note at
gBraley@Braley.com

The Internet is not forever after all: CNET deletes old articles to game Google

Ars Technica 8-16-2023

Content pruning for SEO threatens web history, and experts say it is ill-advised.

CNET, one of the great-granddaddies of tech news on the web, has been having a rough year. First, its AI-written articles sparked drama, then layoffs rocked the publication. And now, Gizmodo reports that the 28-year-old site has been deleting thousands of its old articles in a quest to achieve better rankings in Google searches.  More…