{"id":6817,"date":"2015-01-28T12:21:42","date_gmt":"2015-01-28T16:21:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/?p=6817"},"modified":"2015-01-28T12:21:42","modified_gmt":"2015-01-28T16:21:42","slug":"web-publishers-can-delete-stuff-from-archive-org","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2015\/01\/28\/web-publishers-can-delete-stuff-from-archive-org\/","title":{"rendered":"Web publishers can delete stuff from archive.org"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t think of <em>New Yorker<\/em> magazine as a technical references, but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2015\/01\/26\/cobweb\">&#8220;The Cobweb&#8221;<\/a> by Jill Lepore explains archive.org remarkably well and also helps to explain the many gaps in archive.org. It turns out to be trivial to remove stuff from the archive:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">The Wayback Machine collects every Web page it can find, unless that page is blocked; blocking a Web crawler requires adding only a simple text file, \u201crobots.txt,\u201d to the root of a Web site. The Wayback Machine will honor that file and not crawl that site, and it will also, when it comes across a robots.txt, remove all past versions of that site. When the Conservative Party in Britain deleted ten years\u2019 worth of speeches from its Web site, it also added a robots.txt, which meant that, the next time the Wayback Machine tried to crawl the site, all its captures of those speeches went away, too.<\/p>\n<p>So it&#8217;s an archive only of stuff that publishers want archived&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Even if you already knew the above, I recommend Lepore&#8217;s article for the quality of the writing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t think of New Yorker magazine as a technical references, but &#8220;The Cobweb&#8221; by Jill Lepore explains archive.org remarkably well and also helps to explain the many [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Web publishers can delete stuff from archive.org - Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2015\/01\/28\/web-publishers-can-delete-stuff-from-archive-org\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Web publishers can delete stuff from archive.org - Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I don&#8217;t think of New Yorker magazine as a technical references, but &#8220;The Cobweb&#8221; 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