The Internet Archive launched the full "Wayback Machine"
(http://web.archive.org) on October 24th and it has been quite popular. Much
of the attraction is the October 11th launch of the Sept11 archive
(http://september11.archive.org). By early november we got the performance
of the machine under control by rearchiteching how the index system.

The usage seems to be people looking up their old sites mostly and now doing
some research with the tool. In fact, sites in japan (.jp) are the next most
popular after .com. If there are researchers that would like to analyze the
use, please let us know.

I am very proud to say that it was the #1 site of Yahoo Internet Life's top 100
of 2001:
http://www.yil.com/issues/guide.asp?volume=08&issue=01

Der Speigel called it the "highlight of the year" (and Microsoft is the flop):
http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzkultur/0,1518,175128,00.html

Some lawyers are loving it, witness a WIPO group using it as evidence against a
cybersquater:
http://arbiter.wipo.int/domains/decisions/html/2001/d2001-1037.html


The next steps for this is to listen to feedback and improve the service-- so
please let us know what we should be doing better to foster research and
scholarship.


Also, we are looking to put together researcher tools to do deeper mining of the
archive. Again, we could use some help in definition and implementation.

The Internet Archive is applying for foundation and government grants, so if you
know of places that would be interested in supporting this kind of library,
please let us know. If you are writing grant proposals, please consider writing
us into your proposals.


-brewster
Director, Internet Archive


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