5 ms·

9/11 in the Archive. Go look at all the news websites on September 10th, 2001... and back about a month or two. All empty until 9/11.

DuskStar 7y ago
Supposedly a lot of news sites were pummeled with traffic on 9/11, which prompted investment following that.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Supposedly a lot of news sites were pummeled with traffic on 9/11, I think it's pretty safe to say that new sites were pummeled with traffic on the biggest news day since the internet was widely used for news. Certainly, it's the simplest explanation for how news vs. other sites behaved on 9/11.
gojomo 7y ago
There are many similar gaps in collection in the early years of the Internet Archive. Early archive.org web captures came overwhelmingly from crawls by the company Alexa Internet (which started in 1995 but by 2001 was a subsiiary of Amazon). Alexa's original bulk web crawling was intermittent: restarted once every couple of months, without much focus on rapid re-crawls of news sites. You can also see seasonal patterns, with larger lulls in summers. The events of 2001-09-11 prompted a bunch of fresh, faster crawls – and higher prioritization of news website re-crawls.
abacadaba 7y ago
Na I remember pretty well, there was literally nothing in the news for months before that, top story was shark attacks or something.
- BeetleB 7y ago
  The Witchhunt of Gary Condit, if you really don't remember. My roommate would get upset every time they brought him up on the news - he was sick of hearing about him (never any actual findings or updates - just more and more speculation). I remember a few days after Sept 11, I suggested my friend call the news channels and demand to hear an update on Gary Condit.
- briantakita 7y ago
  9/10/2001: Donald Rumsfeld admitting that $2.3 trillion was unaccounted for from the Defense budget. Backpage story for sure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU4GdHLUHwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU4GdHLUHwU
  - abacadaba 7y ago
    o_0

DuskStar 7y ago

Supposedly a lot of news sites were pummeled with traffic on 9/11, which prompted investment following that.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> Supposedly a lot of news sites were pummeled with traffic on 9/11, I think it's pretty safe to say that new sites were pummeled with traffic on the biggest news day since the internet was widely used for news. Certainly, it's the simplest explanation for how news vs. other sites behaved on 9/11.

gojomo 7y ago

There are many similar gaps in collection in the early years of the Internet Archive. Early archive.org web captures came overwhelmingly from crawls by the company Alexa Internet (which started in 1995 but by 2001 was a subsiiary of Amazon). Alexa's original bulk web crawling was intermittent: restarted once every couple of months, without much focus on rapid re-crawls of news sites. You can also see seasonal patterns, with larger lulls in summers. The events of 2001-09-11 prompted a bunch of fresh, faster crawls – and higher prioritization of news website re-crawls.

abacadaba 7y ago

Na I remember pretty well, there was literally nothing in the news for months before that, top story was shark attacks or something.

BeetleB 7y ago
The Witchhunt of Gary Condit, if you really don't remember. My roommate would get upset every time they brought him up on the news - he was sick of hearing about him (never any actual findings or updates - just more and more speculation). I remember a few days after Sept 11, I suggested my friend call the news channels and demand to hear an update on Gary Condit.
briantakita 7y ago
9/10/2001: Donald Rumsfeld admitting that $2.3 trillion was unaccounted for from the Defense budget. Backpage story for sure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU4GdHLUHwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU4GdHLUHwU
- abacadaba 7y ago
  o_0