I am constantly amazed at new useful things from Google, but they are almost always limited to the web as it is right now. But often, I’m interested in stuff that used to be on the web, but is no longer. For those things, I have to use the Internet Archive and their Wayback Machine.
The problem is the Wayback Machine only works for finding old versions of a known URL. It’s pretty much useless if you are searching for something that is no longer on the web, and you don’t know the URL.
I want Google to partner with the Internet Archive. Give the Archive some of their vast resources, and allow me to search through the entire web at any point in time. So I could search and confine my results to stuff that was available before 1999, for instance. Or a display like Google’s “Fast Flip” that could allow me to scroll through the top results with a time line slider.
Next thing you know, people will be wanting Google to take pictures of every single house on every single street in most of the US, Europe, and Australia so we can simulate driving down a street in Sydney while we sit in Gary, Indiana. And cars that drive themselves!
Did you look at the link I provided? The Internet Archive is doing that right now. They take a snapshot of the entire web and update it constantly. You can look at older versions of most web pages. The problem is that you have to know what web site you are looking for.
Back to the OP’s question, since they’re already working on cars that drive themselves, the next thing I want from Google is the oft-lamented flying car. I mean, it’s 2010 already. Where the heck is my flying car?
My OP was about a desire that would fit into Google’s existing business model. The self driving cars do, as they are dependent on Google’s existing road mapping, and traffic measuring. From what I understand, the cars communicate information back to Google - the more cars on the road equipped this way, the better they will drive. That is a significant future revenue stream.
My desire fits into their model perfectly well - somewhere near the Deja News/Google Groups archive and their current web cache.
Sadly, the Internet Archive appears to be in bed with Alexa, a crappy also-ran in the search business that has gotten into the tracking business in a big way.
Imagine how useful it would be to turn your web browser back to any point in time and just read the web as it existed on that date. You can sort of do that with a single URL right now with the Wayback Machine, but it is far too limited.
I found the Internet Archive is getting worse. More and more sites are asking that their old versions be removed. I used to love to use it to look at “Jumptheshark.com” before it was bought and became a lame site.
I used to be able to access old versions of that site, but now I am no longer able to get any version. As early as March of this year (2010) I was able to access it via the Wayback Machien. Now I can’t
So now too many websites don’t want you to have old versions
Eh, when I worked in network operation at AOL (back around 2000) the head of the web department was fond of noting that his group had enough storage to cache the web. All of it.
He had a ton of storage. Of course, AOL didn’t cache that much for various reasons, porn being a big one and the second was that site owners got mad because it’d screw with their metrics.
I believe that Google has been storing every page it crawls. Google is so big on data mining from searches done on it, and I can’t believe they just delete cached pages off their servers. They may take them out of the index, but they have the files somewhere.
Well, they won’t have to once Google gets done with 'em.
Unless you need to go really fast or you hate the idea of not being aloft, flying cars aren’t going to be useful for much once we get computer controlled cars worked out. A tremendous amount of the inefficiency of driving vanishes when (a) you don’t have to waste the time in transit controlling the machine transporting you and (b) traffic patterns aren’t royally screwed up by having millions of high-latency non-communicative drivers.
…and when the “gaper’s block” can no longer happen. And when merging happens fairly. With computer controlled cars, we could have bumper to bumper traffic moving at 90.
