Web Essay: Never trust a corporation to do a library's job

[mouser]

Something for all of us to remember..

In the last five years, starting around 2010, the shifting priorities of Google’s management left these archival projects in limbo, or abandoned entirely.

After a series of redesigns, Google Groups is effectively dead for research purposes. The archives, while still online, have no means of searching by date.

Google News Archives are dead, killed off in 2011, now directing searchers to just use Google.

https://medium.com/message/never-trust-a-corporation-to-do-a-librarys-job-f58db4673351

from waxy.org

[eleman]

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone. [John Maynard Keynes]

[rxantos]

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone. [John Maynard Keynes]

Alas if only corporations where man.
But corporations have no soul. They are entities whose only purpose is to eat until there is nothing else to eat.  Even if by accident a good person becomes CEO, the shareholders will do everything in their power to change it for the meanest hell spawn they can afford to hire.

[40hz]

Don't depend on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine either. Two short lines of code saved to a file named robots.txt and placed in the root level folder for your domain will not only block IA's web crawler, it will also delete anything the crawler already placed into the Wayback Machine's archives. See here.

There's also the removal policy IA follows.

It has serious ramifications. See the British Library's article about how a political party stealthily removed its archive of speeches from its own website - and then got the IA to remove it from Wayback as well. Article here.

[Stoic Joker]

Sorry, couldn't resist..

[40hz]

^Not a bad idea actually... (I have a little list. They won't be missed.)

[rxantos]

Don't depend on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine either. Two short lines of code saved to a file named robots.txt and placed in the root level folder for your domain will not only block IA's web crawler, it will also delete anything the crawler already placed into the Wayback Machine's archives. See here.

There's also the removal policy IA follows.

It has serious ramifications. See the British Library's article about how a political party stealthily removed its archive of speeches from its own website - and then got the IA to remove it from Wayback as well. Article here.

That's the internet equivalent to good old Book Burning 

[wraith808]

you could have stopped with "Never trust a corporation," truth be told...

[Stoic Joker]

you could have stopped with "Never trust a corporation," truth be told...

Oh...Come on, some horses need whipping dead or alive.