When will the Wayback Machine Update?
I use the wayback machine on a daily basis. Mostly to find a websites’ history for SEO purposes.
In case you haven’t noticed, the last the the wayback machine shows any cached dates was in November 30th 2004. It’s been almost 12 months since they last updated any new coppies of archieved web pages.
According to thier FAQ page:
Right now there is a 6-12 month lag between the date a site is crawled and the date it appears in the Wayback Machine.
But then again, that FAQ page is pretty outdated itself. See this line:
The original idea for the Internet Archive Wayback Machine began in 1996, when the Internet Archive first began archiving the web. Now, five years later…
Another thing you might not have known is:
We do not add pages less than 6 months after they are collected, because of the time delayed donation from Alexa. Updates can take up to 12 months in some cases.
So that explains whyou you’ll never see a cache less than 6 months old. …even when it does update.
Anyone know anyone from Alexa who can give a heads up on when they’ll ever update…or have they abandonded this services (I see some of your own web pages that haven’t changed in years 
and are we watching a slow death due to lack of funds (and would they give me a link if I donate…hehe, you know how my mind works
Whats up Alexa? You’re wayback info is getting kinda stale….going Wayyyy back.
Mind you, I really do like the analysis views that alexa provides, I just hope the wayback machine isn’t dying.
What are your thoughts on Alexa and the wayback machine?
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November 1st, 2005 at 11:35 pm
Timing – I was wondering the exact same thing this morning!
One would think that if the service were ‘failing’ they would at least take it off the home page? That hasn’t happened, so perhaps it really is just massive delays in displaying the cache?
November 3rd, 2005 at 12:02 pm
Hey Jim,
just wanted to email and say I love your blog. You’ve got a truly unique and accurate perspective of this odd (but extremely fun) SEO world..just wanted to say hello and keep up the good work!
-peter
November 3rd, 2005 at 12:08 pm
Thanks Peter!
November 29th, 2005 at 7:08 pm
[...] I have actually owned this domain name since 2000, not May of 2005 as whois.sc and all other domain information sources show. I purchased this domain five years ago as an easy way of showing some of the websites I had designed as well as post my resume for potential employers. And thanks to the Wayback Machine (when will it update, Jim?) I at least have proof that I’ve had a site here since 2001. [...]
December 15th, 2005 at 1:14 am
[...] Next since Google’s so hell bent on absorbing all of the worlds information how about actually building a version of the wayback machine that actually works and is updated with some regularity. As Jim points out the last time it was updated was November 2004. Yeah I know everyone will think you’re just becoming the more of the Google Borg but you are the only company who seems to be interested in it. document.write(“Add to Del.icio.us”) | Add to Y! MyWeb | Digg it | Add to Slashdot Related PostsUnder the WeatherGoogle Sitemaps Stats … Sorta Data … Sorta ScaryPaid Links, Pubcon and Matt CuttsSEO Case Study: Outbound LinksGoogle, Dictionaries and SEO [...]
December 21st, 2005 at 6:13 pm
[...] Jim mentioned a while back that he had not seen it update since November 2004. Maybe they were reading his site, because it seems to have a a bunch of 2005 entries now. I had actually noticed it on a much less high profile site. document.write(“Add to Del.icio.us”) | Add to Y! MyWeb | Digg it | Add to Slashdot [...]