Time travel

Decades before Google dreamed of archiving the world, a site called The Internet Archive did just that. I'd been a huge fan of it in the 1990s, but as web 2.0 and shinier sites came up, I stopped visiting.

www.archive.org/index.php: The Web's memory. It was a combination of necessity and nostalgia that took me back. I was looking for articles from the iconic '90s newsmagazine, a brilliant and often imitated site called Feed.

Google's cache can't keep up with "dead" sites: once a website shuts down, it slips through the web's collective memory.

Among the imitations that Feed spawned were webzines like Salon and Slate, but few Salon or Slate readers would even recall Feed; try accessing the original URL (www.feedmag.com), and you get nowhere. But there it is in all its glory on the Internet Archive, and rediscovering the quality of writing there takes up almost an entire week of reading for me.

web.archive.org/web/* /http://www.feedmag.com/: I hang around for a while in Nostalgia Central, checking out Yahoo!'s sweetly geeky start in 1996, paying homage to the first webcam ever (The Trojan Room Coffee Machine Cam), set up by scientists who were tired of traipsing down two flights of stairs only to find that the coffee machine was empty. I love the Wayback Machine, but there's only so much time you can spend with ghosts.

At the movie archive, it's nice to see that Night of the Living Dead is still popular, alongside rare films like Indian Love Burlesque and old war classics like The Battle of Midway.

I'm tempted by Project Gutenberg, but I'm a regular at this site which has one of the largest collections of out-of-copyright books, so I go over to the Live Music collection.

The Internet Archive may be older than YouTube and the rest but it has a much more sensible search engine "" and it has some absolute gems in the way of concert material. Keying in "jazz" gets you 6,050 choices; I notice that they have really hard-to-find footage of, say, Thelonious Monk or Chucho Valdez.

There's one thing I have to do before I leave, and that's to pay homage to Around the World in 2 Billion Pages. In 2006, the Internet Archive received a grant that allowed it to crawl 2 billion pages in an attempt to develop a global "snapshot" of the web circa 2007-2008.

India is represented by 27 random sites, covering everything from Gandhi to Indian Labour Archives and "India Social". http://wa.archive.org/  around the world/: 2 billion web pages, one year, a global snapshot of the web to date.