On Wed, 03 Jan 2007 18:08:22 +0100, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote: <snip>
archive.org's six-month delay is intentional, but I suppose it could be possible for them to display some form of "we have this site archived on X date and just not displayed yet" identifier to the date-selection page; this would obviate the "not known" problem whilst meaning they don't have to publish it. hmm. If anyone wants to propose it to them, free free.
Actualy I don't think they physicaly get the data untill 6 months have passed. The founder of the archive explained this in a interview with Nerd TV[1]. Basicaly back in the day they started Alexa and the Internet Archive at the same time. Alexa was for profit and the archive is non-profit, and they had a contract between the two that once Alexa was "done" with the data they collected (6 months delay to take the "commercial edge" off it) it was handed over to the Internet Archive. Alexa have since changed ownership, but the contract to supply data to the archive remains in effect, so untill 6 months have passed it's actualy Alexa, not the Internet Archive that have that data as I understand it.
1: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/transcripts/004.html
P.S. To increase the odds of a particular page getting archived (with the caveant that some sites may include no-archive directives in theyr robots.txt or meta HTML haders, such sites are not archived) visit it with a browser that have the Alexa toolbar installed (yuck) or use Internet Explorer (yuck) and choose Tools -> What's related (or some such), wich will also cause Alexa to crawl the page as I understand it (they supply that feature, dunno if it's in IE 7), or just put the url into the form at http://www.alexa.com/site/help/webmasters/#crawl_site