Build Your Own Web Archive: archive.org's Open Source Tools to Crawl, Access & Search Web Captures

The Internet Archive, with support from other libraries around the world, has helped develop a collection of open source tools in Java to support web archiving. These include the Heritrix archival web crawler, “Wayback” for replaying historic web content, and extensions to Nutch for web archive full-text search. This session will explain the design and capabilities these tools, and quickly demo their use for the creation of a small personal web archive.

Heritrix has been designed for faithful and complete content archiving but has also found use in other web search contexts. Wayback allows URL-based lookup and follow-up browsing of archived web content. Nutch, as applied to archival web crawls, allows Google-style full-text search of web content, including the same content as it changes over time. Together, they provide everything necessary to archive and access accurate historical records of web-published content.