Excellent! ArchiveTeam have always been impressive this way. Some years ago, I was working at a video platform that had just announced it would be shutting down fairly soon. I forget how, but one way or another I got connected with someone at ArchiveTeam who expressed their interest in archiving it all before it was too late. Believing this to be a good idea, I gave them a couple of tips about where some of our device-sniffing server endpoints were likely to give them a little trouble, and temporarily "donated" a couple EC2 instances to them to put towards their archiving tasks.
Since the servers were mine, I could see what was happening, and I was very impressed. Within I want to say two minutes, the instances had been fully provisioned and were actively archiving videos as fast as was possible, fully saturating the connection, with each instance knowing to only grab videos the other instances had not already gotten. Basically they have always struck me as not only having a solid mission, but also being ultra-efficient in how they carry it out.
zdimension · 8h ago
Title is imprecise, it's Archiveteam.org, not Archive.org. The Internet Archive is providing free hosting, but the archival work was done by Archiveteam members.
im3w1l · 8h ago
What exactly is archiveteam's contribution? I don't fully understand.
Edit: Like they kinda seem like an unnecessary middle-man between the archive and archivee, but maybe I'm missing something.
creatonez · 7h ago
What ArchiveTeam mainly does is provide hand-made scripts to aggressively archive specific websites that are about to die, with a prioritization for things the community deems most endangered and most important. They provide a bot you can run to grab these scripts automatically and run them on your own hardware, to join the volunteer effort.
This is in contrast to the Wayback Machine's builtin crawler, which is just a broad spectrum internet crawler without any specific rules, prioritizations, or supplementary link lists.
For example, one ArchiveTeam project had the goal to save as many obscure Wikis as possible, using the MediaWiki export feature rather than just grabbing page contents directly. This came in handy for thousands of wikis that were affected by Miraheze's disk failure and happened to have backups created by this project. Thanks to the domain-specific technique, the backups were high-fidelity enough that many users could immediately restart their wiki on another provider as if nothing happened.
They also try to "graze the rate limit" when a website announces a shutdown date and there isn't enough time to capture everything. They actively monitor for error responses and adjust the archiving rate accordingly, to get as much as possible as fast as possible, hopefully without crashing the backend or inadvertently archiving a bunch of useless error messages.
dkh · 6h ago
I just made a root comment with my experience seeing their process at work, but yeah it really cannot be overstated how efficient and effective their archiving process is
iamacyborg · 5h ago
Their MediaWiki tool was also invaluable in helping us fork the Path of Exile wiki from Fandom.
wongarsu · 7h ago
> Like they kinda seem like an unnecessary middle-man between the archive and archivee
They are the middlemen that collects the data to be archived.
In this example the archivee (goo.gl/Alphabet) is simply shutting the service down and has no interest in archiving it. Archive.org is willing to host the data, but only if somebody brings it to them. Archiveteam writes and organises crawlers to collect the data and send it to Archive.org
wlonkly · 4h ago
Archive Team is carrying books in a bucket brigade out of the burning library. Archive.org is giving them a place to put the books they saved.
1gn15 · 8h ago
ArchiveTeam delegates tasks to volunteers and themselves running the Archive Warrior VM, which does the actual archiving. The resultant archives are then centralized by ArchiveTeam and uploaded to the Internet Archive.
(Source: ran a Warrior)
notpushkin · 7h ago
Sidenote, but you can also run a Warrior in Docker, which is sometimes easier to set up (e.g. if you already have a server with other apps in containers).
kalleboo · 59m ago
Yep, I have my archiveteam warrior running in the built-in Docker GUI on my Synology NAS. Just a few clicks to set up and it just runs there silently in the background, helping out with whatever tasks it needs to.
diggan · 8h ago
> What exactly is archiveteam's contribution? I don't fully understand.
If Internet Archive is a library, ArchiveTeam is people who run around collecting stuff, and gives it to the library for safe keeping. Stuff that are estimated/announced to be disappearing/removed soon tends to be focused too.
debesyla · 8h ago
They gathered up the links for processing, because Google doesn't just give a list of short links in use. So the links have to be brute-forcefully gathered first.
Yeah, I'll take that "update" like the extremely unreliable info from an extremely unreliable company that it is.
nocoiner · 8h ago
I have a question about this.
Per google, shortened links “won't work after August 25 and we recommend transitioning to another URL shortener if you haven’t already.”
Am I missing something, or doesn’t this basically obviate the entire gesture of keeping some links active? If your shortened link is embedded in a document somewhere and can’t be updated, google is about to break it, no?
OJFord · 6h ago
About to break it if it didn't seem 'actively used' in late 2024, yes. But if your document was being frequently read and the link actively clicked, it'll (now) keep working.
But as I said in sibling comment to yours, I don't see the point of the distinction, why not just continue them all, surely the mostly unused ones are even cheaper to serve.
OJFord · 8h ago
This leaves me wondering what the point is? What could it possibly cost to keep redirecting existing shortlinks that they consider unused/low activity already anyway?
(In addition to the higher activity ones parent link says they'll now continue to redirect.)
manquer · 4h ago
For a company also running a hosting service like GCP? nothing.
They already have plenty of unused compute /older hardware / CDN POPs, performant distributed data store and everything else possibly needed .
It would be cheaper than the free credits they giveaway just one startup to be on GCP.
I don’t think infra costs are a factor in a decision like this .
RicoElectrico · 6h ago
In another submission someone speculated the reason might be the unending churn of the Google tech stack that just makes low-maintenance stuff impossible.
toomuchtodo · 8h ago
To save face.
fortran77 · 8h ago
I don't really understand this. Is it really that costly to keep the entire database if they're going to keep part of it?
tombert · 8h ago
I built a URL shortener years ago for fun. I don't have the resources that Google has, but I just hacked it together in Erlang using Riak KV and it did horizontally scale across at least three computer (I didn't have more at the time).
Unless I'm just super smart (I'm not), it's pretty easy to write a URL shortener as a key-value system, and pure key-value stuff is pretty easy to scale. I cannot imagine that isn't doing something as or more efficient than what I did.
wtallis · 8h ago
Google also has the advantages that they now only need a read-only key-value store, and they know the frequency distribution for lookups. This is now the kind of problem many programmers would be happy to spend a weekend optimizing to get an average lookup time down to tens of nanoseconds.
tombert · 4h ago
I don't think it would even cost me very much to host all these links on a GCP or AWS thing, I don't think more than a couple hundred dollars a year.
Obviously raw server costs aren't the only costs associated with something like this, you'd still need to pay software people to keep it on life support, but considering how simple URL shorteners are to implement, I still don't think it would be that expensive.
ETA:
I should point out, even something kind of half-assed could be built with Cloud Functions and BigTable really easily; this wouldn't win any kind of contests for low latency, but it would be exceedingly simple code and have sufficient uptime guarantees and would be much less likely to piss off the community.
If I had any idea how to reach out to higher-ups at Google I would offer to contract and build it myself, but that's certainly not necessary, they have thousands of developers, most of which could write this themselves in an afternoon.
benoau · 8h ago
I don't understand the data on ArchiveTeam's page but, it seems like they have 35 terabytes of data (286.56TiB)? It's a lot larger than I'd have thought.
wtallis · 7h ago
FYI, "TiB" means terabytes with a base of 1024, ie. the units you'd typically use for measuring memory rather than the units you'd typically see drive vendors using. The factor of 8 you divided by only applies to units based on bits rather than bytes, and those units use "b" rather than "B", and are only used for capacity measurements when talking about individual memory dies (though they're normal for talking about interconnect speeds).
Either way, we're talking about a dataset that fits easily in a 1U server with at most half of its SSD slots filled.
jdiff · 6h ago
The binary units like GiB, TiB, are technically supposed to be Gibibytes and Tebibytes. Thought it was a bit silly when they first popped up but now I find them adorkably endearing, and a good way to disambiguate something that's often left vague at your expense.
wtallis · 40m ago
In my experience, nobody actually says "Tebibytes" out loud; it's just that silly. In writing, when the precision is necessary, the abbreviation "TiB" does see some actual use.
Aardwolf · 6h ago
I don't understand the page, it shows a list of data sets (I think?) up to 91 TiB in size
The list of short links and their target URLs can't be 91 TiB in size can it? Does anyone know how this works?
jdiff · 6h ago
I did some ridiculous napkin math. A random URL I pulled from a Google search was 705 bytes. A googl link is 22 bytes but if you only store the ID, it'd be 6 bytes. Some URLs are going to be shorter, some longer, but just ballparking it all, that lands us in the neighborhood of hundreds of billions of URLs, up to trillions of URLs.
rafram · 2h ago
> A random URL I pulled from a Google search was 705 bytes.
705 bytes is an extremely long URL. Even if we assume that URLs that get shortened tend to be longer than URLs overall, that’s still an unrealistic average.
SilverElfin · 6h ago
Is there anyone archiving all of reddit? Or twitter? I mean even if their terms have changed to not allow it.
DaSHacka · 5h ago
> reddit
There used to be one such project (Pushshift), before the Reddit API change. You can download all the data and see all the info on the-eye, another datahoarder/preservationist group:
Not that I know of, and you haven't even been able to archive tweets on the Wayback machine for YEARS.
pabs3 · 49m ago
ArchiveTeam was doing that, but their stuff no longer works due to changes at Reddit. The wiki page about it links to some other groups doing Reddit archiving.
No, I meant the .warc.zst files on archive.org that were the result of the ArchiveTeam's work. However, it seems they're under some kind of embargo - which is the first I've ever seen a private link on archive.org
rafram · 2h ago
I can see some reasonable arguments for not publishing the full dataset. People undoubtedly shortened lots of links to unlisted videos/documents/pages under the assumption that the short link, like the original link, would be unguessable.
mdaniel · 24m ago
Then why go to the trouble of archiving them, then upload them to a public archive site, only to then keep them secret?
I'm sure pastebin is filled with people's AWS credentials, too, but you don't see them randomly denying access to listings
do_not_redeem · 8h ago
Does "all" mean all the URLs publicly known, or did they exhaustively iterate the entire URL namespace?
jedberg · 8h ago
They iterated the entire URL namespace by having volunteers run a client so they didn't get IP banned.
Imustaskforhelp · 8h ago
are we sure that the whole entire URL namespace has been mapped?
How would that even function, I mean, did they loop through every single permutation and see the result, or what exactly/ how would that work?
jedberg · 8h ago
> did they loop through every single permutation and see the result, or what exactly/ how would that work?
In short, yes. Since no one can make new links, it's a pre-defined space to search. They just requested every possible key, and recorded the answer, and then uploaded it to a shared database.
toomuchtodo · 8h ago
The pipeline code is available for review of the mechanics of http requests made if you follow the ArchiveTeam wiki links.
barbazoo · 8h ago
Beautiful. I wish I had seen this and could have helped.
The goo.gl URLs that are publicly known are already in the Internet Archive and Common Crawl crawls.
iJohnDoe · 4h ago
Why? Did they ask anyone if it was okay? Anything sensitive at those links? Anything at those links people didn't want or need anymore? Maybe people thought those links were dead? Did Google provide a way to cancel those links first?
It's like when the GPT links were archived and publicly available that contained sensitive information.
anticrymactic · 3h ago
It's a link, what privacy can one expect?
Especially with short links there's always the possibility of entering ~6 characters and getting a hit. So I believe expecting any secrecy from urls is silly.
That's like posting your passwords on Twitter because "Why would anyone find my account"
wiredpancake · 3h ago
Sometimes to preserve history, you just have to go do what you gotta do.
After all, these are just short links. They link to other things on the Internet. Which is inherently public anyways.
You cannot expect privacy via a simple URL. These short URLs are short, hence programmatically scraping all the URLs.
The GPT Links situation is nothing like this imo. Both however do come down to the stupid human aspect.
m3kw9 · 3h ago
Ok how do I access them, or is that not the point?
zahlman · 1h ago
The point is that content previously referred to elsewhere on the Internet (for example, on Stack Overflow) via goo.gl doesn't have to suffer unrecoverable link rot.
Since the servers were mine, I could see what was happening, and I was very impressed. Within I want to say two minutes, the instances had been fully provisioned and were actively archiving videos as fast as was possible, fully saturating the connection, with each instance knowing to only grab videos the other instances had not already gotten. Basically they have always struck me as not only having a solid mission, but also being ultra-efficient in how they carry it out.
Edit: Like they kinda seem like an unnecessary middle-man between the archive and archivee, but maybe I'm missing something.
This is in contrast to the Wayback Machine's builtin crawler, which is just a broad spectrum internet crawler without any specific rules, prioritizations, or supplementary link lists.
For example, one ArchiveTeam project had the goal to save as many obscure Wikis as possible, using the MediaWiki export feature rather than just grabbing page contents directly. This came in handy for thousands of wikis that were affected by Miraheze's disk failure and happened to have backups created by this project. Thanks to the domain-specific technique, the backups were high-fidelity enough that many users could immediately restart their wiki on another provider as if nothing happened.
They also try to "graze the rate limit" when a website announces a shutdown date and there isn't enough time to capture everything. They actively monitor for error responses and adjust the archiving rate accordingly, to get as much as possible as fast as possible, hopefully without crashing the backend or inadvertently archiving a bunch of useless error messages.
They are the middlemen that collects the data to be archived.
In this example the archivee (goo.gl/Alphabet) is simply shutting the service down and has no interest in archiving it. Archive.org is willing to host the data, but only if somebody brings it to them. Archiveteam writes and organises crawlers to collect the data and send it to Archive.org
(Source: ran a Warrior)
If Internet Archive is a library, ArchiveTeam is people who run around collecting stuff, and gives it to the library for safe keeping. Stuff that are estimated/announced to be disappearing/removed soon tends to be focused too.
Enlisting in the Fight Against Link Rot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44877021 - Aug 2025 (107 comments)
Google shifts goo.gl policy: Inactive links deactivated, active links preserved - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44759918 - Aug 2025 (190 comments)
Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44683481 - July 2025 (222 comments)
Google URL Shortener links will no longer be available - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40998549 - July 2024 (49 comments)
Ask HN: Google is sunsetting goo.gl on 3/30. What will be your URL shortener? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19385433 - March 2019 (14 comments)
Tell HN: Goo.gl (Google link Shortener) is shutting down - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16902752 - April 2018 (45 comments)
Google is shutting down its goo.gl URL shortening service - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16722817 - March 2018 (56 comments)
Transitioning Google URL Shortener to Firebase Dynamic Links - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16719272 - March 2018 (53 comments)
Per google, shortened links “won't work after August 25 and we recommend transitioning to another URL shortener if you haven’t already.”
Am I missing something, or doesn’t this basically obviate the entire gesture of keeping some links active? If your shortened link is embedded in a document somewhere and can’t be updated, google is about to break it, no?
But as I said in sibling comment to yours, I don't see the point of the distinction, why not just continue them all, surely the mostly unused ones are even cheaper to serve.
(In addition to the higher activity ones parent link says they'll now continue to redirect.)
They already have plenty of unused compute /older hardware / CDN POPs, performant distributed data store and everything else possibly needed .
It would be cheaper than the free credits they giveaway just one startup to be on GCP.
I don’t think infra costs are a factor in a decision like this .
Unless I'm just super smart (I'm not), it's pretty easy to write a URL shortener as a key-value system, and pure key-value stuff is pretty easy to scale. I cannot imagine that isn't doing something as or more efficient than what I did.
Obviously raw server costs aren't the only costs associated with something like this, you'd still need to pay software people to keep it on life support, but considering how simple URL shorteners are to implement, I still don't think it would be that expensive.
ETA:
I should point out, even something kind of half-assed could be built with Cloud Functions and BigTable really easily; this wouldn't win any kind of contests for low latency, but it would be exceedingly simple code and have sufficient uptime guarantees and would be much less likely to piss off the community.
If I had any idea how to reach out to higher-ups at Google I would offer to contract and build it myself, but that's certainly not necessary, they have thousands of developers, most of which could write this themselves in an afternoon.
Either way, we're talking about a dataset that fits easily in a 1U server with at most half of its SSD slots filled.
The list of short links and their target URLs can't be 91 TiB in size can it? Does anyone know how this works?
705 bytes is an extremely long URL. Even if we assume that URLs that get shortened tend to be longer than URLs overall, that’s still an unrealistic average.
There used to be one such project (Pushshift), before the Reddit API change. You can download all the data and see all the info on the-eye, another datahoarder/preservationist group:
https://the-eye.eu/redarcs/
> twitter
Not that I know of, and you haven't even been able to archive tweets on the Wayback machine for YEARS.
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Reddit
https://github.com/ArthurHeitmann/arctic_shift
Even though all I did was setup the docker container one day and forget about it
I'm sure pastebin is filled with people's AWS credentials, too, but you don't see them randomly denying access to listings
How would that even function, I mean, did they loop through every single permutation and see the result, or what exactly/ how would that work?
In short, yes. Since no one can make new links, it's a pre-defined space to search. They just requested every possible key, and recorded the answer, and then uploaded it to a shared database.
It's like when the GPT links were archived and publicly available that contained sensitive information.
Especially with short links there's always the possibility of entering ~6 characters and getting a hit. So I believe expecting any secrecy from urls is silly.
That's like posting your passwords on Twitter because "Why would anyone find my account"
After all, these are just short links. They link to other things on the Internet. Which is inherently public anyways.
You cannot expect privacy via a simple URL. These short URLs are short, hence programmatically scraping all the URLs.
The GPT Links situation is nothing like this imo. Both however do come down to the stupid human aspect.