I Had a Website: The Practices of Archive Team and the Internet Archive in Archiving GeoCities
The Internet Archive already began collecting GeoCities websites even before its closing announcement, relying on the automated web crawling of Alexa Internet, a web traffic company founded by Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle. After the closing announcement, the Internet Archive focused specifically on archiving GeoCities sites in a special collection. Crawling conducted from July to October of 2009 was “based on publicly-available directories and links to GeoCities pages” ("GeoCities Special Collection 2009”); the more visitors and inbound links a website had, the more likely it was archived. They also archived “special sites nominated by the public” (“GeoCities Special Collection 2009”). In contrast, Archive Team began to archive after the closing announcement. Archive Team volunteers used GNU Wget, a software tool for retrieving files using HTTP or HTTPS protocol. Volunteers with enough storage then synced files among themselves. There is no mention of triaging websites through public interest; instead, Archive Team attempted to archive as many websites as possible with each website given equal weight.
