13 ms·

The new archive.org

302 points by bpierre 12y ago

Mithaldu 12y ago
The new archive.org is over 8MB of HTML, quite impressive. Snark aside, i'd like to read a post about what they changed and why. For example i see they almost entirely removed the previously prominent links to the forums. Why is that?
- maaarghk 12y ago
  It does say on the top right that this is a beta site, so it's probably a weeee bit early to be making comments about "the new direction" and all that.
  - obviouslygreen 12y ago
    I'd say it's exactly the opposite: Early on is exactly when comments about "the new direction" can most reasonably be expected to have an effect, assuming anyone is listening/reading.
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    Well beta means feature complete and considered ready to ship excepting as yet unspotted last minute bugs from testers ... so it's way too late to have input to the new direction, the new direction is at beta stage set in stone unless the update is scrapped.
    - vertex-four 12y ago
      > Well beta means feature complete and considered ready to ship excepting as yet unspotted last minute bugs from testers No, that's a release candidate. A beta is considered feature complete, but potentially not, and almost definitely somewhat buggy and/or non-performant. It's also often not undergone any major form of usability testing, and will often need to be modified to incorporate the results of that.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - nknighthb 12y ago
    On top of what the others said, it requires pointing out that you go to www.archive.org and get the new page. It's shipped. It is the public face now. You don't get to hide behind any sort of pre-release label when you've already made it the default in place of a prior working model.
    - textfiles 12y ago
      If you go to the site cold, you do not get the new site. You get the old site. If, however, you've chosen to look at the new site, a cookie is set so you are looking at the new site. If you click on "exit beta" in the corner, it will go back to the old site and the old site after that. So it's still an option.
      - jacquesm 12y ago
        Please, please, pretty please keep the old site around in some form. It would be the irony of ironies if the archive would no longer be available in its old form.
      - nknighthb 12y ago
        OK, well, that's... Actually worse. Websites should not make changes to a user's settings based simply on a GET against an URL, because the user can click the URL from a random stranger not knowing it would have that effect -- as I did. Aside from being a poor user experience, what has happened here is someone has deliberately coded a security vulnerability. Granted the impact here is basically trivial, but it's still a pretty classic no-no, and should have immediately set off flashing lights and klaxons in any security-conscious developer's mind.
        textfiles 12y ago
        I think the dev team would be surprised to hear that getting to see the new site is a security vulnerability!
        nknighthb 12y ago
- aselzer 12y ago
  Wow, this is due to them including more than 50 or so base64 encoded inline images. They should really change this. The page took more than 8s to load (with cached images).
  - Mahn 12y ago
    Huh. Why would anyone think that was a good idea.
    - snsr 12y ago
      It results in fewer HTTP requests.
      - nknighthb 12y ago
        It also results in a 33% byte overhead on top of the additional CPU and memory usage involved in actually pulling out and decoding base64 on the client side, and it screws up caching. What should be a quick reload of this page results in the transfer of that 8MB all over again, and takes very nearly as long as the original load. There is no universe in which this was wise.
        snsr 12y ago
        All good points; I wasn't advocating, just observing :)
- Turing_Machine 12y ago
  Jiminy Christmas, that's slow. Disclaimer: I'm on an unreliable hotel internet connection. On the other hand, most of the world is on bad internet connections all the time. Loading the images on mouseover (or whatever) would avoid having to wait for that massive slug of data. I sure don't want to be loading that much data every time I go to the site, especially not on expensive mobile bandwidth, and especially since (as others noted) the images appear to be uncacheable. So: nice job on the look, not so great on the bandwidth. :-)
aw3c2 12y ago
Awww why... This looks incredibly cluttered. Infinite scrolling is a terrible idea in an _archive_. If you use the list view instead, you get a very hard to scan "3 narrow lines for 1" design. The site is very broken if you don't have Javascript enabled. I am scared how CPU intense it would be on my mobile or cheap netbook. The details of collections don't even display any items. Where is the list of files inside an item? Previously there was a nice table. Now everything seems to focus on images instead. IA hosts a lot of things that are not visual. Music, texts, data. Those seem like second row citizens now. The cover of an album tells me .. nothing about the music itself. For an archive, I think this is a rather bad interface. The technical implementation seems very un-archivey and more suited to a "dumb user" discovery interface built upon an existing well-presented archive. :( PS: The categories and tags on the side are a nice addition. If someone from IA reads this, I think at least https://archive.org/advancedsearch.php https://archive.org/advancedsearch.php is not using output buffering which might make user's performance much better. Overall the site is very very slow. edit: Some comparison images. Old: http://i.imgur.com/gJXgJhI.png http://i.imgur.com/gJXgJhI.png New default: http://i.imgur.com/JOEoAiu.png http://i.imgur.com/JOEoAiu.png New list: http://i.imgur.com/m2d1Gf4.png http://i.imgur.com/m2d1Gf4.png Old: http://i.imgur.com/X7e2s5T.png http://i.imgur.com/X7e2s5T.png New: http://i.imgur.com/9HsrQO1.png http://i.imgur.com/9HsrQO1.png
- vanderZwan 12y ago
  > For an archive, I think this is a rather bad interface. The technical implementation seems very un-archivey and more suited to a "dumb user" discovery interface built upon an existing well-presented archive. :( I think this hits the nail on the head. I don't think the new interface is bad per se, it's just optimized for a different goal than the one of most current visitors of archive.org. It would probably work best as a page dedicated to "dumb user discovery" - which might very well be an user-base worth pursuing. This is one of those cases where creating user personas and trying to come up with different interfaces optimised for each of them would probably be the best approach.
  - aw3c2 12y ago
    I wholeheartedly agree. Interfaces like that can be nice for initial browsing but I am a user who knows what she wants and I want efficiency and lots of metadata.
sirn 12y ago
My first impression: wow, looks minimal. This is a nice change. I like it! Then I read the comment here and realized the page hasn't fully loaded yet. The fact that above the fold part loads almost instantly (including top menu which worked right away) is very nice, but I'm not quite sure about the rest. It's slow, heavy and really hogs up CPU when it's loaded.
- Mahn 12y ago
  Oh, wow, had you not mentioned it I would have guessed that there was a part below the fold.
- Throwaway12830 12y ago
  I went back after seeing your comment. This looks like Pinterest if it existed in the 90s.
- acdha 12y ago
  Wow, thanks for noting that – I'm now watching the 4.7MB and counting HTML trickle in.
domas 12y ago
You can provide feedback/comments directly to them by clicking "exit beta" in the top right.
butwhy 12y ago
I've been waiting for something like this to happen, as the old design just looks old and doesn't encourage me to use it. But.. I'm sure haters gonna hate.
- userbinator 12y ago
  If you're looking at the Internet Archive, then you should very well expect to see a lot of other "old" things besides the site itself.
danbee 12y ago
This is practically unusable in Safari on my MacBook Pro. It's a shame because once it actually loads it looks quite nice!
bane 12y ago
I with there was a word stronger than love for what I feel about archive.org. It's one of the amazing promises of the Internet come true. If I have one criticism of archive.org it's that things are impossible to find, even if you know they have them - this redesign doesn't solve this problem. I think the principle problem is that what should be a meta-layer on the organization, the provenance of a collection of stuff, is often used just as often as an organizational scheme as media and subject type. And example. I'm looking to see if they have "A calendar of dinners, with 615 recipes" by Marion Harris Neil. Where would you suppose this book would be? If I go to "eBooks and Texts" I'm simply met with a wall of collections, none of which are subject area organized, is it under Microfilm, or Canadian Libraries? Boston Library Consortium? Who knows? I'll never find it by browsing and the way books are collected is pretty much useless. Unless I know there's a copy under "Canadian Libraries" I'll probably not find it. Sure I can search for it, "A calendar of dinners" gives me 3 results! Turns out it's buried under the following Archives: "Toronto Public Library", "The Library of Congress", "Cornell University Library". Notice that none of these are the crumbtrail I used to find it the first time on accident (Canadian Libraries)! How about Omni Magazine? Is it a "Text"? I'm not sure, even today. I do know if I go to texts and search all texts for "Omni" I get it back. But it's part of "The Magazine Rack" and "Additional Collections" which I still have not figured out how to just navigate to. These are just texts, video, audio and other media types are similarly hard to navigate and find stuff. There's little pleasure in browsing archive because if you find something, it'll be by accident, not because you navigated to some pocket of cool stuff. Good luck seeing what SF books they have and browsing it. That's actually a collection I'd care about. I also like old radio shows, and those are scatter shot all over the site. Unless somebody basically just uploaded an entire series at once, good luck piecing it together. Right now, about the only way I know something is on archive.org is because the person who uploaded the item mentions it on a podcast or something. I'm almost tempted to just start a meta-website of some sort to start organizing stuff I care about to that other people like me can find it. It's kind of a mess, and it's given me a lot more respect for what librarians have largely solved in the physical world.
- db48x 12y ago
  Interestingly enough, at the open house last night they talked about how they want to shift focus a bit and make it easier for people to do exactly that. They've gotten really good at storing things, and at digitizing them, and now they need to be better at letting people curate and organize collections. Of course, as it stands anyone can make a website of their own that links to and/or embeds anything stored in the archive, but I gather that hasn't happened often.
TomGullen 12y ago
I love archive.org. Has my first website ever on it, no way would this exist without archive.org any more! http://web.archive.org/web/20020726224013/http://www.gamezoner.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20020726224013/http://www.gamezon...
droithomme 12y ago
The page here has 13.5MB in assets for the initial load, including a 7.9MB top html file. Takes 29.5 seconds to load, assuming all extensions and plugins like adblock are disabled, otherwise it seems to never complete loading. In both cases, it pins one CPU at 100% while it loads.
davea37 12y ago
Is the old one available anywhere? ;)
- aw3c2 12y ago
  Just click "exit beta" in the top right corner and please leave feedback.
  - TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
    How do I leave feedback?
    - aw3c2 12y ago
      If you click the exit beta button there is a form.
      - TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
        There wasn't when I clicked it...? Exit beta takes me straight to the old version without any form or anything showing.
        textfiles 12y ago
        If you aren't getting the form, you can write info@archive.org with any thoughts or comments you have and they'll be forwarded to the dev team, who are gleefully swimming in mail as we speak.
72deluxe 12y ago
Isn't infinite scrolling a memory hog?
- acdha 12y ago
  It's a risk but implementers can take the sting out of it. Browsers aren't currently smart enough to do things like unload decoded <img> memory for things which aren't visible but you can avoid the worst of it if you use a CSS background-image (which browsers do unload) and a visibility test on scroll to avoid loading things which aren't visible or soon to be visible. This works as far back as IE8 so it might be worth the hassle.
  - 72deluxe 12y ago
    Thank you - very informative. I would not have known the behaviour of browsers with regard to that - is there an established standard or accepted behaviour documented somewhere? I'm guessing that the CSS spec only dictates how things should be shown and not what browsers can do with off-screen items.
    - acdha 12y ago
      Correct: the only way to know for sure is to test it. I think a few minor extensions could make that a lot easier – e.g. a CSS :visible selector and support for background-image: attr(…)
      - 72deluxe 12y ago
        Thank you. The massive amount of testing is surely what hampers web development? Years ago in the dark ages people dreamed of cross-platform apps; the three main players in this market (desktop only) now are Windows, Mac OSX and Linux (to a tiny extent). Writing a cross-platform native app is no longer a massive exercise in frustration (see wxWidgets or Qt). Someone thought Java would solve all our problems, but it seems to have fallen out of fashion, and everyone pins their hopes and dreams on cross-platform apps with websites, but surely the effort is far larger: testing on 3+ browsers per OS at least! I don't see how everyone copes.
ANTSANTS 12y ago
This looks fancy and Web 2.0 and pinteresty and whatnot (and has the page size and CPU requirements to prove it), but it still has the fundamental problem of the old archive.org: it thinks portals are still relevant to the internet. They're not. One person or organization can't meaningfully organize all of the world's information, it's not worth trying. It's like saying "we're bringing the Dewey Decimal System into the 21st century." No, rigid hierarchical classification just doesn't cut it any more. Just focus on archiving the information, improving the search mechanism[1], and staying alive, and let the community handle curation and discovery. [1] Merchanisms? Sorry to weeb out, but they should really look at Danbooru (NSFW) sometime. Tag-based classification and search works extremely well when (1) the users submitting the content aren't the people that made the content, so there's no conflict of interest encouraging them to try to game the system by spamming tags and whatnot, (2) there are strong guidelines for what is and isn't acceptable, what is and isn't subjective, and (3) the users are as dedicated and passionate as anime fans and archivists are. Let the users contribute objective tags, add support for subjective/personal tags ("pools" in booru lingo) that don't show up in search results but provide a way for users to curate, and for the love of god let them "fave" things and see their friend's favorites, and participation on archive.org would explode overnight.
ooooak 12y ago
> server: nginx/1.1.19 > Powered By: PHP/5.3.10-1ubuntu3.2 why 5.3 ? and ubuntu3.2 !!!
- db48x 12y ago
  Eh, that's not the version of Ubuntu that they are running; the whole thing is the php version number. There is a general convention among Linux distributions to backport security fixes to the older versions of software that come with their older releases. In this case, Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) was released with PHP 5.3.10 plus some security patches, available in the Ubuntu package repository under the name php5 with the composite version number 5.3.10-1ubuntu3.14. Their website doesn't list a newer version of this package (http://packages.ubuntu.com/precise-updates/php5 http://packages.ubuntu.com/precise-updates/php5), so possibly they're ahead of the official Ubuntu releases. The reasoning for this is that while it might be nice to upgrade in order to get new features, new bug fixes, and new performance enhancements, these potential benefits are often outweighed by the very real cost of testing everything to make sure the upgrade doesn't cause regressions. Backporting the security fixes makes sticking with a base version possible. I imagine that upgrading is pretty low on their list of things to do; it would have to get them some nice benefits, and nothing about php is ever nice. I'm a software engineer myself, and I upgrade individual libraries far more often than I upgrade the actual programming-language runtime (or compiler), simply because that's where you get the most benefit (usually a fix for a specific bug, but sometimes a new feature will be tempting) for the least risk.
glomek 12y ago
Yikes! That's different! But it still doesn't have the one feature that I've been wishing they would implement forever. In a collection of audio files, I wish they would provide a podcast feed. It would be so nice to be able to listen to Old Time Radio shows as podcasts.
- aw3c2 12y ago
  That's a great idea, be sure to mail them about it at info@archive.org!
frik 12y ago
Direct link to the WayBack Machine: https://archive.org/web/ https://archive.org/web/
asaddhamani 12y ago
I agree with the general sentiment of this thread. This redesign was not needed in the first place. The new website is incredibly slow to load, and the infinite scrolling thing absolutely sucks. While I can see all my uploads with the old(better) website, the new one doesn't seem to work. Just says "Fetching more results", and then nothing happens. With the tabs, if I try to list my uploads by, say, text, it reloads the page and switches the tab to collections, and then I have to click the Uploads tab again to see the filtered results. Same when I remove a filter. Even on my workstation computer with a nice overclocked CPU, I can see the CPU usage jump to the top whenever I load the site. The website takes 19.90s to load with cache disabled, with ~200 requests and 6.5MB of data transferred. The older website takes 4.21s to load, with 18 requests and 280KB of data transferred, in contrast. Meanwhile, features like the ability to playback WARC files that are uploaded by users don't seem to be getting any attention, but a feature like that would make so much sense for a site like the Internet Archive. I can see they provide a player for media files, why not provide something for WARC files too, then? As a heavy user of the site, the redesign(at least at the current state) will only ever hinder my experience, I can't see it being helpful in any way.
- db48x 12y ago
  A WARC might have been put into the Wayback Machine; do a search there for the url. Failing that, there are proxies you can run locally that let you access the content of a WARC as if you were browsing the original site. https://github.com/internetarchive/warcprox https://github.com/internetarchive/warcprox is even by IA themselves, so clearly they're working on it. A viewer that let you browse the contents of a WARC the same way you can do for a zip would be really nice, but it's probably a separate project from redesigning the site. In fact, browsing zip files (and a bunch of other similar file types, of course) was added only a few months ago.
  - asaddhamani 12y ago
    True, the WARC file might have been included in the Wayback Machine, but I meant something different. I'm specifically interested in the ability to specify which WARC file I want to play back. I think an example would be better than me trying to explain it. Have a look at https://webrecorder.io https://webrecorder.io, it lets you play back any WARC or ARC file, you just have to provide the URL. I know this is outside the realm of a redesign, but if IA could add something like this, it would be a big UX improvement.
textfiles 12y ago
Jason Scott, here. Disclaimer: I work for the Internet Archive (although I don't speak for the entire Archive) and I'm vaguely gung-ho on the place: https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/527549181175427072 https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/527549181175427072 I am also, as part of my job there, one of the largest individual uploaders of data to archive.org - I've added hundreds of thousands of individual items (texts, movies, music, websites) since I started working there in 2011. So, moving on. Welcome to the new user interface beta. I'm glad to see people toying with it, and the commentary and complaints are very, very welcome. As a smallish organization with a lot going on, the responses from people really digging down in the beta are very appreciated. First, I'll say that the Beta interface is a "true" beta - it's the result of a lot of internal work, arguments, and discussions, but nothing is 100% set in stone. This isn't a beta like Gmail or a FPS trying to determine the rate of firing of the chaingun weapon: this is a lot of best-approach attempts at a whole range of goals. There's bound to be lots of responses from a lot of camps that are now coming forward. (For example, the new site has accessibility issues that need to be addressed.) If the term "beta" has been wrecked, stick with "prototype". The internal name was V2, so I tend to keep calling it that. V2 is the first major redesign of the main archive.org site in over a decade. And part of the conditions of this project (done by a handful of people) were to keep the old site (retroactively called V1) running, and mostly unchanged. That was a whole bucket of headache that isn't even obvious when you come into the site. (Anyone who has done this knows how it can be). With over 20 petabytes of data on the site, and millions of items and objects, spanning the whole environment without downtime is a feat in itself. So there's a whole range of philosophies being approached, but just getting the backend into a shape where it could sustain a new interface to it was a lot of non-obvious work. Moving to the site as it is now. Definitely slow. Definitely a shock. Definitely some great choices, some which might seem like head-scratchers. There is a designer, with a vision (his name is David) and there's been approaches to all the intended known shortcomings of V1 Internet Archive in this prototype. One of the issues with Archive.org that's been an issue is non-responsiveness for different platforms - you got one site and that was it. Another was a lack of visual interface as an option. Now there is one. The tagging and metadata efforts were spotty before now, because you were not really rewarded for doing so. The V2 site uses these tags and metadata extensively, and will continue to. This has been a nightmare for me, frankly - I've had to add logos to the 1,200 collections of items I've been uploading, and I'm doing descriptions as well as tags. But under the new system, the chance for finding things has increased exponentially. There are definitely cases where I have to swap back to V1 to get kinds of "work done", because as an intense power-user, I do all sorts of grandiose work. But then again, 99% of my interaction with maintaining and adding content to the Internet Archive, I do through the API, and specifically through a python command-line interface we've had a developer working on for over a year: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/internetarchive https://pypi.python.org/pypi/internetarchive I've uploaded many thousands of items, analyzed and upgraded their metadata, and done search-and-modify runs by the hundreds with this tool. It's being constantly updated. In the future, I expect us to see multiple improvements to the interface - one which is much more bandwidth and processor friendly, a version of the "view" (we have image and list right now) that is optimum for researchers, and so on. But I'll stress again: - This is a prototype which was done with a pretty small team who had to keep the old site running as smoothly as possible, while doing essentially a decade of upgrade in one swoop; - Now that it's "proven" that it works, refinement by the truckload needs to happen - Your comments are not just welcome but encouraged - Increased interest in the archive and the materials, and working together to find ways to access the petabytes of data in a meaningful way is not just a nice side benefit, but a vital core of the Archive's mission Thanks for reading.
deleted 12y ago
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deleted 12y ago
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bgutj 12y ago
The only thing I've tested with the new beta interface is the ability to search all books for a particular word or phrase at the top level. This has not been implemented. If I am looking to write a biography about a particular person, for example, who is mentioned in passing in n books in the archive and I search for this person, I will find a very small amount of these books, perhaps even zero. If I go to a particular book, I can search -inside- that book for words/phrases. I would like to do with the raw text from all books.
calinet6 12y ago
Increase.. spacing... between top icons... and labels.. twitch Sorry, designeritis.
wj 12y ago
I like it. I was looking at it for thirty seconds and came across two collections that I didn't know existed. Great to discover new stuff and I can still search if I know what I'm looking for.
taejo 12y ago
There's an escaping bug: at https://archive.org/details/movies https://archive.org/details/movies I see "Arts & Music", etc. The download links for movies (and I guess other files) should set their disposition to download rather than playing in the browser.

302 points by bpierre 12y ago

The new archive.org is over 8MB of HTML, quite impressive. Snark aside, i'd like to read a post about what they changed and why. For example i see they almost entirely removed the previously prominent links to the forums. Why is that?

maaarghk 12y ago
It does say on the top right that this is a beta site, so it's probably a weeee bit early to be making comments about "the new direction" and all that.
- obviouslygreen 12y ago
  I'd say it's exactly the opposite: Early on is exactly when comments about "the new direction" can most reasonably be expected to have an effect, assuming anyone is listening/reading.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  Well beta means feature complete and considered ready to ship excepting as yet unspotted last minute bugs from testers ... so it's way too late to have input to the new direction, the new direction is at beta stage set in stone unless the update is scrapped.
  - vertex-four 12y ago
    > Well beta means feature complete and considered ready to ship excepting as yet unspotted last minute bugs from testers No, that's a release candidate. A beta is considered feature complete, but potentially not, and almost definitely somewhat buggy and/or non-performant. It's also often not undergone any major form of usability testing, and will often need to be modified to incorporate the results of that.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- nknighthb 12y ago
  On top of what the others said, it requires pointing out that you go to www.archive.org and get the new page. It's shipped. It is the public face now. You don't get to hide behind any sort of pre-release label when you've already made it the default in place of a prior working model.
  - textfiles 12y ago
    If you go to the site cold, you do not get the new site. You get the old site. If, however, you've chosen to look at the new site, a cookie is set so you are looking at the new site. If you click on "exit beta" in the corner, it will go back to the old site and the old site after that. So it's still an option.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      Please, please, pretty please keep the old site around in some form. It would be the irony of ironies if the archive would no longer be available in its old form.
    - nknighthb 12y ago
      OK, well, that's... Actually worse. Websites should not make changes to a user's settings based simply on a GET against an URL, because the user can click the URL from a random stranger not knowing it would have that effect -- as I did. Aside from being a poor user experience, what has happened here is someone has deliberately coded a security vulnerability. Granted the impact here is basically trivial, but it's still a pretty classic no-no, and should have immediately set off flashing lights and klaxons in any security-conscious developer's mind.
      - textfiles 12y ago
        I think the dev team would be surprised to hear that getting to see the new site is a security vulnerability!
        nknighthb 12y ago
aselzer 12y ago
Wow, this is due to them including more than 50 or so base64 encoded inline images. They should really change this. The page took more than 8s to load (with cached images).
- Mahn 12y ago
  Huh. Why would anyone think that was a good idea.
  - snsr 12y ago
    It results in fewer HTTP requests.
    - nknighthb 12y ago
      It also results in a 33% byte overhead on top of the additional CPU and memory usage involved in actually pulling out and decoding base64 on the client side, and it screws up caching. What should be a quick reload of this page results in the transfer of that 8MB all over again, and takes very nearly as long as the original load. There is no universe in which this was wise.
      - snsr 12y ago
        All good points; I wasn't advocating, just observing :)
Turing_Machine 12y ago
Jiminy Christmas, that's slow. Disclaimer: I'm on an unreliable hotel internet connection. On the other hand, most of the world is on bad internet connections all the time. Loading the images on mouseover (or whatever) would avoid having to wait for that massive slug of data. I sure don't want to be loading that much data every time I go to the site, especially not on expensive mobile bandwidth, and especially since (as others noted) the images appear to be uncacheable. So: nice job on the look, not so great on the bandwidth. :-)

aw3c2 12y ago

Awww why... This looks incredibly cluttered. Infinite scrolling is a terrible idea in an _archive_. If you use the list view instead, you get a very hard to scan "3 narrow lines for 1" design. The site is very broken if you don't have Javascript enabled. I am scared how CPU intense it would be on my mobile or cheap netbook. The details of collections don't even display any items. Where is the list of files inside an item? Previously there was a nice table. Now everything seems to focus on images instead. IA hosts a lot of things that are not visual. Music, texts, data. Those seem like second row citizens now. The cover of an album tells me .. nothing about the music itself. For an archive, I think this is a rather bad interface. The technical implementation seems very un-archivey and more suited to a "dumb user" discovery interface built upon an existing well-presented archive. :( PS: The categories and tags on the side are a nice addition. If someone from IA reads this, I think at least https://archive.org/advancedsearch.php https://archive.org/advancedsearch.php is not using output buffering which might make user's performance much better. Overall the site is very very slow. edit: Some comparison images. Old: http://i.imgur.com/gJXgJhI.png http://i.imgur.com/gJXgJhI.png New default: http://i.imgur.com/JOEoAiu.png http://i.imgur.com/JOEoAiu.png New list: http://i.imgur.com/m2d1Gf4.png http://i.imgur.com/m2d1Gf4.png Old: http://i.imgur.com/X7e2s5T.png http://i.imgur.com/X7e2s5T.png New: http://i.imgur.com/9HsrQO1.png http://i.imgur.com/9HsrQO1.png

vanderZwan 12y ago
> For an archive, I think this is a rather bad interface. The technical implementation seems very un-archivey and more suited to a "dumb user" discovery interface built upon an existing well-presented archive. :( I think this hits the nail on the head. I don't think the new interface is bad per se, it's just optimized for a different goal than the one of most current visitors of archive.org. It would probably work best as a page dedicated to "dumb user discovery" - which might very well be an user-base worth pursuing. This is one of those cases where creating user personas and trying to come up with different interfaces optimised for each of them would probably be the best approach.
- aw3c2 12y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree. Interfaces like that can be nice for initial browsing but I am a user who knows what she wants and I want efficiency and lots of metadata.

sirn 12y ago

My first impression: wow, looks minimal. This is a nice change. I like it! Then I read the comment here and realized the page hasn't fully loaded yet. The fact that above the fold part loads almost instantly (including top menu which worked right away) is very nice, but I'm not quite sure about the rest. It's slow, heavy and really hogs up CPU when it's loaded.

Mahn 12y ago
Oh, wow, had you not mentioned it I would have guessed that there was a part below the fold.
Throwaway12830 12y ago
I went back after seeing your comment. This looks like Pinterest if it existed in the 90s.
acdha 12y ago
Wow, thanks for noting that – I'm now watching the 4.7MB and counting HTML trickle in.

domas 12y ago

You can provide feedback/comments directly to them by clicking "exit beta" in the top right.

butwhy 12y ago

I've been waiting for something like this to happen, as the old design just looks old and doesn't encourage me to use it. But.. I'm sure haters gonna hate.

userbinator 12y ago
If you're looking at the Internet Archive, then you should very well expect to see a lot of other "old" things besides the site itself.

danbee 12y ago

This is practically unusable in Safari on my MacBook Pro. It's a shame because once it actually loads it looks quite nice!

bane 12y ago

I with there was a word stronger than love for what I feel about archive.org. It's one of the amazing promises of the Internet come true. If I have one criticism of archive.org it's that things are impossible to find, even if you know they have them - this redesign doesn't solve this problem. I think the principle problem is that what should be a meta-layer on the organization, the provenance of a collection of stuff, is often used just as often as an organizational scheme as media and subject type. And example. I'm looking to see if they have "A calendar of dinners, with 615 recipes" by Marion Harris Neil. Where would you suppose this book would be? If I go to "eBooks and Texts" I'm simply met with a wall of collections, none of which are subject area organized, is it under Microfilm, or Canadian Libraries? Boston Library Consortium? Who knows? I'll never find it by browsing and the way books are collected is pretty much useless. Unless I know there's a copy under "Canadian Libraries" I'll probably not find it. Sure I can search for it, "A calendar of dinners" gives me 3 results! Turns out it's buried under the following Archives: "Toronto Public Library", "The Library of Congress", "Cornell University Library". Notice that none of these are the crumbtrail I used to find it the first time on accident (Canadian Libraries)! How about Omni Magazine? Is it a "Text"? I'm not sure, even today. I do know if I go to texts and search all texts for "Omni" I get it back. But it's part of "The Magazine Rack" and "Additional Collections" which I still have not figured out how to just navigate to. These are just texts, video, audio and other media types are similarly hard to navigate and find stuff. There's little pleasure in browsing archive because if you find something, it'll be by accident, not because you navigated to some pocket of cool stuff. Good luck seeing what SF books they have and browsing it. That's actually a collection I'd care about. I also like old radio shows, and those are scatter shot all over the site. Unless somebody basically just uploaded an entire series at once, good luck piecing it together. Right now, about the only way I know something is on archive.org is because the person who uploaded the item mentions it on a podcast or something. I'm almost tempted to just start a meta-website of some sort to start organizing stuff I care about to that other people like me can find it. It's kind of a mess, and it's given me a lot more respect for what librarians have largely solved in the physical world.

db48x 12y ago
Interestingly enough, at the open house last night they talked about how they want to shift focus a bit and make it easier for people to do exactly that. They've gotten really good at storing things, and at digitizing them, and now they need to be better at letting people curate and organize collections. Of course, as it stands anyone can make a website of their own that links to and/or embeds anything stored in the archive, but I gather that hasn't happened often.

TomGullen 12y ago

I love archive.org. Has my first website ever on it, no way would this exist without archive.org any more! http://web.archive.org/web/20020726224013/http://www.gamezoner.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20020726224013/http://www.gamezon...

droithomme 12y ago

The page here has 13.5MB in assets for the initial load, including a 7.9MB top html file. Takes 29.5 seconds to load, assuming all extensions and plugins like adblock are disabled, otherwise it seems to never complete loading. In both cases, it pins one CPU at 100% while it loads.

davea37 12y ago

Is the old one available anywhere? ;)

aw3c2 12y ago
Just click "exit beta" in the top right corner and please leave feedback.
- TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
  How do I leave feedback?
  - aw3c2 12y ago
    If you click the exit beta button there is a form.
    - TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
      There wasn't when I clicked it...? Exit beta takes me straight to the old version without any form or anything showing.
      - textfiles 12y ago
        If you aren't getting the form, you can write info@archive.org with any thoughts or comments you have and they'll be forwarded to the dev team, who are gleefully swimming in mail as we speak.

72deluxe 12y ago

Isn't infinite scrolling a memory hog?

acdha 12y ago
It's a risk but implementers can take the sting out of it. Browsers aren't currently smart enough to do things like unload decoded <img> memory for things which aren't visible but you can avoid the worst of it if you use a CSS background-image (which browsers do unload) and a visibility test on scroll to avoid loading things which aren't visible or soon to be visible. This works as far back as IE8 so it might be worth the hassle.
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  Thank you - very informative. I would not have known the behaviour of browsers with regard to that - is there an established standard or accepted behaviour documented somewhere? I'm guessing that the CSS spec only dictates how things should be shown and not what browsers can do with off-screen items.
  - acdha 12y ago
    Correct: the only way to know for sure is to test it. I think a few minor extensions could make that a lot easier – e.g. a CSS :visible selector and support for background-image: attr(…)
    - 72deluxe 12y ago
      Thank you. The massive amount of testing is surely what hampers web development? Years ago in the dark ages people dreamed of cross-platform apps; the three main players in this market (desktop only) now are Windows, Mac OSX and Linux (to a tiny extent). Writing a cross-platform native app is no longer a massive exercise in frustration (see wxWidgets or Qt). Someone thought Java would solve all our problems, but it seems to have fallen out of fashion, and everyone pins their hopes and dreams on cross-platform apps with websites, but surely the effort is far larger: testing on 3+ browsers per OS at least! I don't see how everyone copes.

ANTSANTS 12y ago

This looks fancy and Web 2.0 and pinteresty and whatnot (and has the page size and CPU requirements to prove it), but it still has the fundamental problem of the old archive.org: it thinks portals are still relevant to the internet. They're not. One person or organization can't meaningfully organize all of the world's information, it's not worth trying. It's like saying "we're bringing the Dewey Decimal System into the 21st century." No, rigid hierarchical classification just doesn't cut it any more. Just focus on archiving the information, improving the search mechanism[1], and staying alive, and let the community handle curation and discovery. [1] Merchanisms? Sorry to weeb out, but they should really look at Danbooru (NSFW) sometime. Tag-based classification and search works extremely well when (1) the users submitting the content aren't the people that made the content, so there's no conflict of interest encouraging them to try to game the system by spamming tags and whatnot, (2) there are strong guidelines for what is and isn't acceptable, what is and isn't subjective, and (3) the users are as dedicated and passionate as anime fans and archivists are. Let the users contribute objective tags, add support for subjective/personal tags ("pools" in booru lingo) that don't show up in search results but provide a way for users to curate, and for the love of god let them "fave" things and see their friend's favorites, and participation on archive.org would explode overnight.

ooooak 12y ago

> server: nginx/1.1.19 > Powered By: PHP/5.3.10-1ubuntu3.2 why 5.3 ? and ubuntu3.2 !!!

db48x 12y ago
Eh, that's not the version of Ubuntu that they are running; the whole thing is the php version number. There is a general convention among Linux distributions to backport security fixes to the older versions of software that come with their older releases. In this case, Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) was released with PHP 5.3.10 plus some security patches, available in the Ubuntu package repository under the name php5 with the composite version number 5.3.10-1ubuntu3.14. Their website doesn't list a newer version of this package (http://packages.ubuntu.com/precise-updates/php5 http://packages.ubuntu.com/precise-updates/php5), so possibly they're ahead of the official Ubuntu releases. The reasoning for this is that while it might be nice to upgrade in order to get new features, new bug fixes, and new performance enhancements, these potential benefits are often outweighed by the very real cost of testing everything to make sure the upgrade doesn't cause regressions. Backporting the security fixes makes sticking with a base version possible. I imagine that upgrading is pretty low on their list of things to do; it would have to get them some nice benefits, and nothing about php is ever nice. I'm a software engineer myself, and I upgrade individual libraries far more often than I upgrade the actual programming-language runtime (or compiler), simply because that's where you get the most benefit (usually a fix for a specific bug, but sometimes a new feature will be tempting) for the least risk.

glomek 12y ago

Yikes! That's different! But it still doesn't have the one feature that I've been wishing they would implement forever. In a collection of audio files, I wish they would provide a podcast feed. It would be so nice to be able to listen to Old Time Radio shows as podcasts.

aw3c2 12y ago
That's a great idea, be sure to mail them about it at info@archive.org!

frik 12y ago

Direct link to the WayBack Machine: https://archive.org/web/ https://archive.org/web/

asaddhamani 12y ago

I agree with the general sentiment of this thread. This redesign was not needed in the first place. The new website is incredibly slow to load, and the infinite scrolling thing absolutely sucks. While I can see all my uploads with the old(better) website, the new one doesn't seem to work. Just says "Fetching more results", and then nothing happens. With the tabs, if I try to list my uploads by, say, text, it reloads the page and switches the tab to collections, and then I have to click the Uploads tab again to see the filtered results. Same when I remove a filter. Even on my workstation computer with a nice overclocked CPU, I can see the CPU usage jump to the top whenever I load the site. The website takes 19.90s to load with cache disabled, with ~200 requests and 6.5MB of data transferred. The older website takes 4.21s to load, with 18 requests and 280KB of data transferred, in contrast. Meanwhile, features like the ability to playback WARC files that are uploaded by users don't seem to be getting any attention, but a feature like that would make so much sense for a site like the Internet Archive. I can see they provide a player for media files, why not provide something for WARC files too, then? As a heavy user of the site, the redesign(at least at the current state) will only ever hinder my experience, I can't see it being helpful in any way.

db48x 12y ago
A WARC might have been put into the Wayback Machine; do a search there for the url. Failing that, there are proxies you can run locally that let you access the content of a WARC as if you were browsing the original site. https://github.com/internetarchive/warcprox https://github.com/internetarchive/warcprox is even by IA themselves, so clearly they're working on it. A viewer that let you browse the contents of a WARC the same way you can do for a zip would be really nice, but it's probably a separate project from redesigning the site. In fact, browsing zip files (and a bunch of other similar file types, of course) was added only a few months ago.
- asaddhamani 12y ago
  True, the WARC file might have been included in the Wayback Machine, but I meant something different. I'm specifically interested in the ability to specify which WARC file I want to play back. I think an example would be better than me trying to explain it. Have a look at https://webrecorder.io https://webrecorder.io, it lets you play back any WARC or ARC file, you just have to provide the URL. I know this is outside the realm of a redesign, but if IA could add something like this, it would be a big UX improvement.

textfiles 12y ago

Jason Scott, here. Disclaimer: I work for the Internet Archive (although I don't speak for the entire Archive) and I'm vaguely gung-ho on the place: https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/527549181175427072 https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/527549181175427072 I am also, as part of my job there, one of the largest individual uploaders of data to archive.org - I've added hundreds of thousands of individual items (texts, movies, music, websites) since I started working there in 2011. So, moving on. Welcome to the new user interface beta. I'm glad to see people toying with it, and the commentary and complaints are very, very welcome. As a smallish organization with a lot going on, the responses from people really digging down in the beta are very appreciated. First, I'll say that the Beta interface is a "true" beta - it's the result of a lot of internal work, arguments, and discussions, but nothing is 100% set in stone. This isn't a beta like Gmail or a FPS trying to determine the rate of firing of the chaingun weapon: this is a lot of best-approach attempts at a whole range of goals. There's bound to be lots of responses from a lot of camps that are now coming forward. (For example, the new site has accessibility issues that need to be addressed.) If the term "beta" has been wrecked, stick with "prototype". The internal name was V2, so I tend to keep calling it that. V2 is the first major redesign of the main archive.org site in over a decade. And part of the conditions of this project (done by a handful of people) were to keep the old site (retroactively called V1) running, and mostly unchanged. That was a whole bucket of headache that isn't even obvious when you come into the site. (Anyone who has done this knows how it can be). With over 20 petabytes of data on the site, and millions of items and objects, spanning the whole environment without downtime is a feat in itself. So there's a whole range of philosophies being approached, but just getting the backend into a shape where it could sustain a new interface to it was a lot of non-obvious work. Moving to the site as it is now. Definitely slow. Definitely a shock. Definitely some great choices, some which might seem like head-scratchers. There is a designer, with a vision (his name is David) and there's been approaches to all the intended known shortcomings of V1 Internet Archive in this prototype. One of the issues with Archive.org that's been an issue is non-responsiveness for different platforms - you got one site and that was it. Another was a lack of visual interface as an option. Now there is one. The tagging and metadata efforts were spotty before now, because you were not really rewarded for doing so. The V2 site uses these tags and metadata extensively, and will continue to. This has been a nightmare for me, frankly - I've had to add logos to the 1,200 collections of items I've been uploading, and I'm doing descriptions as well as tags. But under the new system, the chance for finding things has increased exponentially. There are definitely cases where I have to swap back to V1 to get kinds of "work done", because as an intense power-user, I do all sorts of grandiose work. But then again, 99% of my interaction with maintaining and adding content to the Internet Archive, I do through the API, and specifically through a python command-line interface we've had a developer working on for over a year: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/internetarchive https://pypi.python.org/pypi/internetarchive I've uploaded many thousands of items, analyzed and upgraded their metadata, and done search-and-modify runs by the hundreds with this tool. It's being constantly updated. In the future, I expect us to see multiple improvements to the interface - one which is much more bandwidth and processor friendly, a version of the "view" (we have image and list right now) that is optimum for researchers, and so on. But I'll stress again: - This is a prototype which was done with a pretty small team who had to keep the old site running as smoothly as possible, while doing essentially a decade of upgrade in one swoop; - Now that it's "proven" that it works, refinement by the truckload needs to happen - Your comments are not just welcome but encouraged - Increased interest in the archive and the materials, and working together to find ways to access the petabytes of data in a meaningful way is not just a nice side benefit, but a vital core of the Archive's mission Thanks for reading.

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bgutj 12y ago

The only thing I've tested with the new beta interface is the ability to search all books for a particular word or phrase at the top level. This has not been implemented. If I am looking to write a biography about a particular person, for example, who is mentioned in passing in n books in the archive and I search for this person, I will find a very small amount of these books, perhaps even zero. If I go to a particular book, I can search -inside- that book for words/phrases. I would like to do with the raw text from all books.

calinet6 12y ago

Increase.. spacing... between top icons... and labels.. twitch Sorry, designeritis.

wj 12y ago

I like it. I was looking at it for thirty seconds and came across two collections that I didn't know existed. Great to discover new stuff and I can still search if I know what I'm looking for.

taejo 12y ago

There's an escaping bug: at https://archive.org/details/movies https://archive.org/details/movies I see "Arts & Music", etc. The download links for movies (and I guess other files) should set their disposition to download rather than playing in the browser.