I’ve always wanted to know who they are. This is probably the brain of the internet. Archive.org literally indexes and captures the changes that are made to a website. Right from sites like ours to sites like Google.com, they have these archived. But I have never known who they were and how they did it. Until now.
Talking about the vision and the lifecycle of a version of a website, Kahle says:
“The average life of a web page is about 100 days before it’s either changed or deleted,” says Kahle. “Even if it’s supported by big companies: Google Video came down, Yahoo Video came down, Apple went and wiped out all the pages in Mobile Me.” Capturing this transient web was Kahle’s original mission for the Internet Archive when he founded it in 1996. Nearly two decades later, the 53-year-old compares his organization to a “Library of Alexandria, version two.”
But for a site like Archive.org, it should take a lot of server storage space. And here’s how it is:
Kahle estimates it has about 15 petabytes of information (a petabyte is approximately one million gigabytes of data). That’s a lot less than Facebook’s estimated 300 petabytes, but there’s a big difference: “The Internet Archive is a nonprofit, and nope, there’s no buying it,” says Kahle. Kahle has sold other companies in the past. The Internet Archive was started with funding from the 1995 sale of his search system WAIS, which AOL purchased for $15 million. His online tracking service Alexa was sold to Amazon for $250 million in 1999. The Internet Archive’s current budget is around $12 million.
The entire article is very interesting and is worth a read. Hit the source link below to read the rest of the article.