How the Wayback Machine Archives the Web, Explained Through a Search for Orkut

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A developer tried to revisit Orkut's old login page after Google shut the service down, and found it preserved in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The Archive is a non-profit digital library founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle, and its web archive stores the actual files a server delivered, including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, so old pages still function. Capture frequency is not fixed: popular sites may be saved many times a day, while small sites may be recorded only occasionally, depending on their popularity and inbound links. Pages are discovered through link-following crawlers, imported seed lists, user-submitted Save Page Now requests, and volunteer rescue crawls such as those run by Archive Team before shutdowns. Captured data is stored in standardized WARC files, which hold the full raw HTTP responses that allow faithful replay.

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