According to The Internet Archive:

Most societies place importance on preserving artifacts of their culture and heritage. Without such artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. Our culture now produces more and more artifacts in digital form. The Archive's mission is to help preserve those artifacts and create an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars. The Internet Archive provides free access to collections of digitized media including websites, software applications, music, audiovisual, and print materials. The Archive also advocates a free and open Internet. Its mission is committing to provide "universal access to all knowledge". The Internet Archive has a permanent record of internet with the aim being to preserve as much of the public web as possible. The Internet Archive also oversees numerous book digitization projects, collectively one of the world's largest book digitization efforts.

Watch a short two minutes video of The Internet Archive's first crawl from the year 1996: https://archive.org/details/wayback-machine-1996/The+Wayback+Machine's+First+Crawl+1996+--with+subtitles.mp4 Use @ia or @internetarchive to search on Internet Archive directly from your search cum address bar. Creating Ethical & Privacy-oriented Mozilla Firefox Add-ons. 100% hand coded software - so you are assured these add-ons will never, ever contain AI slop and will work reliably every time you use it. Now. Always. Contribute liberally. Make a difference. We need your love and active support. Please participate in this mission at https://buymeacoffee.com/handmadeinternettreasures Contribute liberally to encourage us and allow us to keep our lights on and focus on maintaining this Handmade Internet Treasure and create more Handmade Internet Treasures for you!