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Posted on July 23, 2020 By Robert Payne

archive.today
Screenshot of the archive.today home page
Type of site
Web archiving
Available inMultilingual
URL
RegistrationNo
LaunchedMay 16, 2012; 12 years ago (2012-05-16)[2]

archive.today (formerly archive.is) is a web archiving website founded in 2012 that saves snapshots on demand, and has support for JavaScript-heavy sites such as Google Maps and X.[3] archive.today records two snapshots: one replicates the original webpage including any functional live links; the other is a screenshot of the page.[4]

The identity of its operator is not known.[5]

History

Archive.today was founded in 2012. The site originally branded itself as archive.today, but changed the primary mirror to archive.is in May 2015.[6] It began to deprecate the archive.is domain in favor of other mirrors in January 2019.[7]

As of 2021, archive.today had saved about 500 million pages.[5]

Features

Functionality

Archive.today can capture individual pages in response to explicit user requests.[8][9][10] Since its beginning, it has supported crawling pages with URLs containing the now-deprecated hash-bang fragment (#!).[11]

Archive.today records only text and images, excluding XML, RTF, spreadsheet (xls or ods) and other non-static content. However, videos for certain sites, like X (formerly Twitter), are saved.[12] It keeps track of the history of snapshots saved, requesting confirmation before adding a new snapshot of an already saved page.[13][14]

Pages are captured at a browser width of 1,024 pixels. CSS is converted to inline CSS, removing responsive web design and selectors such as :hover and :active. Content generated using JavaScript during the crawling process appears in a frozen state.[15] HTML class names are preserved inside the old-class attribute. When text is selected, a JavaScript applet generates a URL fragment seen in the browser's address bar that automatically highlights that portion of the text when visited again.

Web pages can be duplicated from archive.today to web.archive.org as second-level backup, but archive.today does not save its snapshots in WARC format. The reverse—from web.archive.org to archive.today—is also possible,[16] but the copy usually takes more time than a direct capture. Historically, website owners had the option to opt out of Wayback Machine through the use of the robots exclusion standard (robots.txt), and these exclusions were also applied retroactively.[17] Archive.today does not obey robots.txt because it acts "as a direct agent of the human user."[10] As of 2019, Wayback Machine no longer obeys robots.txt.

The research toolbar enables advanced keywords operators, using * as the wildcard character. A couple of quotation marks address the search to an exact sequence of keywords present in the title or in the body of the webpage, whereas the insite operator restricts it to a specific Internet domain.[18]

Once a web page is archived, it cannot be deleted directly by any Internet user.[19]

Removing advertisements, popups or expanding links from archived pages is possible by asking the owner to do it on his blog.[20]

While saving a dynamic list, archive.today search box shows only a result that links the previous and the following section of the list (e.g. 20 links for page).[21] The other web pages saved are filtered, and sometimes may be found by one of their occurrences.[13][clarification needed]

The search feature is backed by Google CustomSearch. If it delivers no results, archive.today attempts to utilize Yandex Search.[22]

While saving a page, a list of URLs for individual page elements and their content sizes, HTTP statuses and MIME types is shown. This list can only be viewed during the crawling process.

One can download archived pages as a ZIP file, except pages archived since 29 November 2019, when archive.today changed their browser engine from PhantomJS to Chromium.[23]

In July 2013, Archive.today began supporting the API of the Memento Project.[24][25]

Worldwide availability

Australia and New Zealand

See also: Internet censorship in Australia and Internet censorship in New Zealand

In March 2019, the site was blocked for six months by several internet providers in Australia and New Zealand in the aftermath of the Christchurch mosque shootings in an attempt to limit distribution of the footage of the attack.[26][27]

China

See also: Internet censorship in China

According to GreatFire.org, archive.today has been blocked in mainland China since March 2016,[28] archive.li since September 2017,[29] archive.fo since July 2018,[30] as well as archive.ph since December 2019.[31]

Finland

On 21 July 2015, the operators blocked access to the service from all Finnish IP addresses, stating on Twitter that they did this in order to avoid escalating a dispute they allegedly had with the Finnish government.[32]

Russia

See also: Internet censorship in Russia

In 2016, the Russian communications agency Roskomnadzor began blocking access to archive.is from Russia.[33][34]

Cloudflare DNS availability

Since May 2018[35][36] Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS service would not resolve archive.today's web addresses, making it inaccessible to users of the Cloudflare DNS service. Both organizations claimed the other was responsible for the issue. Cloudflare staff stated that the problem was on archive.today's DNS infrastructure, as its authoritative nameservers return invalid records when Cloudflare's network systems made requests to archive.today. archive.today countered that the issue was due to Cloudflare requests not being compliant with DNS standards, as Cloudflare does not send EDNS Client Subnet information in its DNS requests.[37][38]

See also

References

  1. ^ @archiveis (30 October 2019). "a current list of all tor domains and clear net domains" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  2. ^ Archive.is blog (18 February 2014). "When did the Archive-is site originally launch?". Tumblr. Archived from the original on 20 March 2021. Retrieved 10 April 2021.
  3. ^ Brinkmann, Martin (22 April 2015). "Create publicly available web page archives with Archive.is". Ghacks. Archived from the original on 12 April 2019. Retrieved 13 June 2015.
  4. ^ Brunelle, Justin F.; Kelly, Mat; Weigle, Michele C.; Nelson, Michael L. (25 January 2015). "The impact of JavaScript on archivability" (PDF). International Journal on Digital Libraries. 17 (2): 95–117. doi:10.1007/s00799-015-0140-8. S2CID 8433375. Archived (PDF) from the original on 27 May 2019.
  5. ^ a b Patokallio, Jani (5 August 2023). "archive.today: On the trail of the mysterious guerrilla archivist of the Internet". Gyrovague. Archived from the original on 13 August 2023. Retrieved 1 January 2024.
  6. ^ "Why did you change the URL back from archive-today to archive-is?". Archive.is Blog. 3 May 2015. Archived from the original on 1 June 2015. Retrieved 6 January 2019.
  7. ^ @archiveis (4 January 2019). "Please do not use archive.IS mirror for linking, use others mirrors [.TODAY .FO .LI .VN .MD .PH]. .IS might stop working soon" (Tweet). Archived from the original on 6 January 2019 – via Twitter.
  8. ^ Dascalescu, Dan (18 February 2013). "Web page archiving – Dan Dascalescu's Wiki (review)". Wiki.dandascalescu.com. Archived from the original on 22 September 2013. Retrieved 3 October 2013.
  9. ^ Koebler, Jason (29 October 2014). "Dear GamerGate: Please Stop Stealing Our Shit". Motherboard. Archived from the original on 27 May 2019. Retrieved 22 March 2017. There is no way for a website to protect itself from having an Archive.today user mirror the site.
  10. ^ a b "Archive.today FAQ". archive.today. Retrieved 15 February 2019.
  11. ^ "Home page of Archive.is in 2013". Archived from the original on 12 January 2013.
  12. ^ "Archive.today blog". Archived from the original on 7 September 2021.
  13. ^ a b Archiving Websites with the Archive.is, 15 April 2016, archived from the original on 27 January 2022, retrieved 27 January 2022
  14. ^ "Example snapshot history on archive.is".
  15. ^ JavaScript-generated loading animation of Dailymotion video appearing in a frozen state
  16. ^ "Example: Page saved from Web Archive to Archive.is" (in Spanish). Archived from the original on 20 May 2013. Retrieved 23 October 2019.
  17. ^ "FAQs - Some sites are not available because of Robots.txt or other exclusions. What does that mean?". Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Archived from the original on 15 April 2011.
  18. ^ For example, the string insite: https://en.wikipedia.org "World Cup" returns the "World+Cup"/ related snapshots
  19. ^ "Some Frequently Asked Question" (blog). archive.is. 24 January 2013. Archived from the original on 26 September 2013. Retrieved 12 November 2018.
  20. ^ "Example user request on the Archive.is blog". Archive.is blog. Archived from the original on 29 April 2022. Retrieved 7 April 2022.
  21. ^ Example of dynamic list: "au:"thomas aquinas"". WorldCat. Archived from the original on 23 March 2019. Retrieved 15 December 2018.
  22. ^ "Just realized that I can search for keywords in the search bar for archive today, was this a recently added feature?". Archive.is blog. 18 January 2022. Archived from the original on 27 January 2022. Retrieved 27 January 2022.
  23. ^ "The "download zip" button has been giving a "Not found" error for quite some time". Archive.is blog. 17 July 2020. Archived from the original on 3 October 2020.
  24. ^ Nelson, Michael L. (9 July 2013). "Archive.is Supports Memento". Research and Teaching Updates. Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group at Old Dominion University. Archived from the original on 27 July 2013. Retrieved 17 September 2013.
  25. ^ "archive.is". Memento Protocol Information. Memento Development Group. Archived from the original on 15 September 2013. Retrieved 17 September 2013.
  26. ^ "ISPs in AU and NZ start censoring the internet without legal precedent". Private Internet Access. 19 March 2019. Archived from the original on 28 April 2023. Retrieved 20 March 2019.
  27. ^ "New Zealand ISPs Say They're Blocking Sites That Fail To Remove Christchurch Shooting Video". Gizmodo Australia. 19 March 2019. Archived from the original on 18 May 2019. Retrieved 20 March 2019.
  28. ^ "archive.is is 100% blocked in China". GreatFire Analyzer. 12 August 2018. Archived from the original on 12 August 2018.
  29. ^ "archive.li is 100% blocked in China". Great Fire Analyzer. 12 August 2018. Archived from the original on 12 August 2018.
  30. ^ "archive.fo is 100% blocked in China". Great Fire Analyzer. 12 August 2018. Archived from the original on 12 August 2018.
  31. ^ "archive.ph is 100% blocked in China". en.greatfire.org. Archived from the original on 29 April 2022. Retrieved 7 April 2022.
  32. ^ Lapintie, Lassi (22 July 2015). "Suomalaisilta estettiin haktivistien suosimalla verkkosivulla käynti" [Finns' access to website used by hacktivists blocked]. Iltalehti (in Finnish). Archived from the original on 27 May 2019. Retrieved 4 March 2016.
  33. ^ Elistratov, Vladimir (29 January 2016). "Roskomnadzor zablokiroval servis archive.is, khranyashchiy kopii veb-saytov" Роскомнадзор заблокировал сервис archive.is, хранящий копии веб-сайтов. TJournal (in Russian). Archived from the original on 30 August 2017. Retrieved 30 January 2016.
  34. ^ Cushing, Tim (4 February 2016). "Russia Blocks Another Archive Site Because It Might Contain Old Pages About Drugs". Techdirt. Archived from the original on 23 March 2019. Retrieved 26 February 2016.
  35. ^ "Archive.is – Error 1001". Cloudflare Community. 15 May 2018. Archived from the original on 2 December 2021. Retrieved 2 December 2021.
  36. ^ "Archive.today & related sites failing again". Cloudflare Community. 3 March 2024. Archived from the original on 3 April 2024. Retrieved 20 March 2024.
  37. ^ @archiveis (16 July 2018). "'Having to do' is not so direct here. Absence of EDNS and massive mismatch (not only on AS/Country, but even on the continent level) of where DNS and related HTTP requests come from causes so many troubles so I consider EDNS-less requests from Cloudflare as invalid" (Tweet). Archived from the original on 2 August 2023 – via Twitter.
  38. ^ "Comment by Matthew Prince on Hacker News". Hacker News. 4 May 2019. Archived from the original on 13 May 2022. Retrieved 4 October 2021.

Social media

Secondary Sources

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today

    by Robert Payne

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