Internet Library Enables Users to Surf the Web's Past; Group Adds Dimension of Time to the Internet by Developing a Collection of Election 2000 Web Sites.

Business Editors/Internet Writers

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 18, 2001

Alexa Internet today announced the Election 2000 Collection, a groundbreaking collection of date-searchable Web sites that enables users to travel back in time to see how election-related pages appeared on the Web during that time in history.

The Election 2000 Collection, developed for the U.S. Library of Congress by the Internet Archive and Compaq Computer, is now available as an Internet library containing archived copies of more than 1000 election-related Web sites (http://archive.alexa.com). The collection, searchable by date, by website, and by category via Alexa's new Wayback Machine technology, contains more than two million megabytes, or about 87 million pages, of election-related information gathered between August 1, 2000 and January 14, 2001, including what was published on the candidates' web sites, political party sites, and major news sites.

The Election 2000 Collection is important because it contributes to the historical record of the U.S. Presidential Election, capturing information that could otherwise have been lost. With the growing role of the Web as an influential medium in our culture, records of historical events such as the U.S. Presidential election could be never printed on paper. Internet content changes at a very rapid pace, especially during events such as elections, and indeed many important election sites have already disappeared from the Web. With the Election 2000 Collection, rapidly changing sites were archived daily or even twice and three times in a day in an attempt to capture the dynamic nature of Internet content.

Florian Baur, a graduate student at University Passau in Germany, is using the Election 2000 Collection to research a thesis about the Internet's role during the recent presidential election. As an early user, he found that, "A thorough analysis would have been virtually impossible without the collection....the collection is a great tool for anybody interested in the political use of the Web. Due to the short-lived nature of the medium, institutions like the Internet Archive provide an almost indispensable service for the scientific community."

Compaq Computer undertook the major task of collecting and archiving sites for the collection. "Compaq Research was able to deep crawl hundreds of Web sites each day to build an unprecedented record of the changing nature of the web. It was tricky because finding all the images, videos, and computer scripts associated with each page required developing specialized technology," said Brewster Kahle, president of Alexa Internet.

Alexa Internet created the Wayback Machie technology that allows users to browse this huge collection and other Internet Libraries like it. "By enabling users to retrieve Web sites out of the past, Alexa's Wayback Machine technology adds a time dimension to the Internet and creates the first `time browser' for the Web," said Kahle.

About Alexa Internet

Alexa Internet, the Web Information Company, gathers, stores, indexes and makes available multi-terabyte digital libraries, collections of Web sites and other Internet information. The company's Archive of the Web has been growing since 1996, and now contains over 40 terabytes of data. Alexa also offers a free Web navigation service (available at www.alexa.com) which gives Internet users access to the Archive as they surf, as well as detailed information about Web sites such as related links, contact information, site statistics, and reviews. The company donates a copy of its Archive of the Web on an ongoing basis to the non-profit Internet Archive, which is endowed to preserve our digital heritage for scholarly access. Alexa, a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com, is located on the Web at http://www.alexa.com.