The Wayback Machine began archiving cached web pages on May 12, 1996, with the goal of making the service public five years later.
Internet Archive founders Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat

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Software has been developed to "crawl" the Web and download all publicly accessible information and data files on webpages, the Gopher hierarchy, the Netnews(Usenet) bulletin board system, and downloadable software. The information collected by these "crawlers" does not

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From its public launch in 2001, the Wayback Machine has been studied by scholars both for the ways it stores and collects data as well as for the actual pages contained in its

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In Europe, the Wayback Machine could be interpreted as violating copyrightlaws. Only the content creator can decide where their content is published or duplicated, so the Archive would have to

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Archive.org is currently blocked in China. After the Islamic State terrorist organization was banned, the Internet Archive had been blocked in its entirety in Russiaas a host of an outreach video from that organization, for a short time in 2015–16. Since 2016, the

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• List of Web archiving initiatives
• Heritrix
• Library Genesis
• Web archiving
• Time capsule

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Scientology
In late 2002, the Internet Archive removed various sites that were critical of Scientologyfrom the Wayback Machine. An error message stated that this was in response to a "request by the site owner". Later, it was clarified that

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