Interesting numbeers
I got an email from the Wayback Machine today. They’ve partnered with Automattic (the company behind WordPress) to publish a free plugin to fight link rot – dead links. According to them, 43% of the whole www is published with WordPress.
They say they’ve catalogued a trillion (!) web pages. Apparently, Pew looked into it and found that from a group of 10-year-old websites they studied, 38% of the links were dead.
I run into this a lot. Second only to websites who don’t publish the date, so you think you’re looking at the dates for this year’s Weaselfest but it’s actually 2017. But I digress.
The way it works, you install this plugin and it catalogues all the links you’ve posted and schedules them for backup. Then if the site breaks, they seamlessly switched to the archived version. Not a bad idea, if it works.
A trillion webpages. That’s got to be incredibly expensive to store. I’ve always wondered how they’re funded, so I asked Grok.
He says they have an annual budget of $20–37 million and a significant chunk of that comes from small donors. Then there are regular grants from philanthropic foundations and money from the government for archiving. They offer services like book digitizing.
I know what you’re going to ask. I’m not sure if I’m eligible for this plugin. Some years ago, there was a frenzy of copyright trolling. It was costing little websites thousands in legal claims. I’m usually careful about copyright, but I’ve published about 6,000 images and I couldn’t be sure, so I asked Wayback to forget sweasel.com. I never checked to see if they did.
April 15, 2026 — 4:43 pm
Comments: 3