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This reminds me of the story from about ten years ago about a racist police dog in Pittsburgh that would attack bystanders: http://www.oocities.org/ericsquire/articles/dogs/wtae030425.... and http://web.archive.org/web/20080503212841/http://dir.salon.c...

Tangent: I'm extremely frustrated at how ephemeral web pages are. I googled the story to provide a reference, and the most reputable sources for the story are dead. I found 404s on Salon.com, Fox News, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and PBS.org. Sadly, I found some of these links on a racist forum. It sucks that Storm Front keeps bytes around longer than these other sites.

Anyway, I just donated $25 to archive.org to support what they're doing. I've been using the Wayback Machine for years and always took it for granted. I'm not sure what made things different about tonight's frustration at broken links, but for the first time I just became worried about the preservation of history.



I'm a little surprised that there wasn't a valid google cache still kicking around for any of those dead links.


Google often rapidly removes cache links for dead pages even though they're still indexed. Sometimes it takes weeks, sometimes it takes minutes.


Google is for-profit organization. They're not interested in keeping stuff unless it makes them money.


Making money is not the only goal of a for profit organization. Being public certainly doesn't help but if "don't be evil" is still ingrained in Google's culture, I would expect them to support archive.org's effort.




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