The Way We Webbed

You double-check to make sure you are looking at the 2001 version and not this morning's.

The nature of the Web is that it captures everything, throws it up on your screen and says, "Have at it." Much of its content is unmanned, abandoned when webmasters get bored or news gets old, and sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between a ghost site and a live one.

In a modern 2008 Google, for example, one could surmise that Bill Richardson is still running for president, that Chelsea Clinton is still campaigning for her mother and that Mel Gibson just became offended by "Brokeback Mountain." Popular links haven't been taken down, and so time appears . . . frozen.

Online, history has been flattened, appearing not as a linear progression but as a chaotic plane where the past occasionally collides with the present. It's like splatting paintballs on the canvas of time.

* * *

Naturally, there are people trying to organize the splats into a meaningful order. Naturally, those people are librarians and archivists. Google was not the first group to think of delving into the ghosts of our Internet past.

At the Internet Archives in San Francisco, researchers have been building a piecemeal history of the Web since 1996 through a search engine called the Wayback Machine. They call it a part of humans' "right to remember," and they have accumulated 100 billion Web pages.

To grasp the sheer volume of information, "we tried to work out, if every page was a cocktail napkin, how many visits to the moon that would be," says Kristine Hanna, the director of Web archiving services. "We gave up."

Google founders were so hellbent on browsing the future that they neglected to save their own past; the search engine had to turn to the Internet Archive to re-create its 2001 time trip.

To bring us back to an era when the only hit for "Brangelina" was "Hernandez Brangelina," born 1933.

A time when fans gathered in chat rooms to discuss the need for baseball in D.C.

When the Cubs looked like they just might make it to the World Series, until tanking yet again . . .