It's not a general reference site, but for certain things, archive.org can be sheer gold. It is a messy, difficult to search website. The digitized images are often poor quality; the OCRed text even worse. But it contains things you can't find anywhere else. It contains all sorts of printed material Google Books hasn't touched. Comic books, for example. US comic books like Walt Disney's Uncle Scrooge. Brazilian comic books like Turma da Mônica.
It also attempts to periodically capture and save the entire web. The captures are viewable in archive.org's "Wayback Machine." That, too, has all sorts of problems. The UI is awkward, the captures sometimes have technical glitches, and it can't generate with dynamically generated web pages, for example. Nevertheless, in an age when entities try to avoid embarrassment by rewriting their own history, archive.org stands between us and 1984's "memory hole."
It also attempts to periodically capture and save the entire web. The captures are viewable in archive.org's "Wayback Machine." That, too, has all sorts of problems. The UI is awkward, the captures sometimes have technical glitches, and it can't generate with dynamically generated web pages, for example. Nevertheless, in an age when entities try to avoid embarrassment by rewriting their own history, archive.org stands between us and 1984's "memory hole."
Statistics: Posted by nisiprius — Sun Feb 02, 2025 5:45 pm