Not content with reading about Cranfield experiments that defined the modern approach to information retrieval, William Webber is now looking to Ancient Rome for inspiration. Actually, he was just looking for images of the original Yahoo! home page, back when it was a directory rather than a search engine. He settled for an image from a 1998 article, but he can do better than that. The Internet Archive has a bunch of snapshots of the Yahoo home page, dating back to 1996.
The Internet Archive is a wonderful thing, and I am certain it’s good for many hours of procrastination. Here, for example, is the first capture of FXPAL’s home page, from mid-1998, complete with the spouting geyser of our ideas. Interestingly, of the seven people who have home pages listed on that site, four are still at FXPAL, but with considerably less hair.
Of course the past didn’t change much (and still doesn’t), so archiving it is straightforward. A bigger challenge is how to archive modern dynamic sites that are all loaded at run-time through javascript, Flash, or Silverlight. How will the Wayback machine handle the list of today’s world leaders, for example?