Internet Time Machine

Abstract

Internet Time Machine is an application that keeps track of and archives the evolution of a website in a space-economical manner. Internet has become the most common and handy source of information and knowledge in the 21st century. However, due to the inherent nature of the Internet, which data can be added, removed, or modified too easily both without any notifications to the readers nor any traces of the changes left behind, resources on the web are not as persistent as physical publications do. Many meaningful and precious contents were missed or even vanished ever after. This main disadvantage also makes referencing resources from the web not convincing and causes unnecessary confusion to web surfers. Tackling this problem has already been not only a personal interest, [1] a need for academic researches, [2] or a kind of business strategy, [3] but even some governments are now aware of the importance of reserving the cyber culture, [4] and realized that keeping the history of the cyber world significantly helps regulating people’s online behaviours. [5] The Internet Time Machine is developed to solve these problems by keep tracking different versions of websites as time goes by. So that users can look up previous versions of the websites at any instants on the timeline. It is known that there are already several web applications doing similar tasks. [6; 7; 8] Studies and analyses of those existing services are carried out. With different caching and compressing algorithms, the Internet Time Machine is to be built as an entirely new cross platforms application that runs faster, is more user-friendly, and is mainly focusing on space-economical matters.