wayback VS png-db

In this tutorial, we will explore how to scrape data from the past using the Wayback Machine API. We'll be using Python and the requests library to make HTTP requests and retrieve archived versions of web pages. The code provided demonstrates a basic implementation of scraping historical data from a list of URLs within a specified date range.

A bit of context: I do a lot of archive digging with Apple's website. For the longest time, they hosted large files through Akamai. Most URLs looked something like this: http://a2032.g.akamai.net/5/2032/51/6cafb32dc21f74/1a1a1aaa2198c627970773d80669d84574a8d80d3cb12453c02589f25382f26493036bda4ebd305fd241a71b92f365ca/appleworks62_box.eps.hqx Unfortunately, those files shifted around from subdomain to subdomain (one period of time it was under a2032.g.akamai.net, another might be a1008.g.akamai.net) so finding all copies of a specific file was a pain in the ass. I recently learned that the IA has an API for the Wayback's Server that allows way more filtering than the web UI does. So to find every *.g.akamai.net URL they have archived, I used: http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=*.g.akamai.net/*

For the following step, you will need the Wayback Machine's CDX API, the documentation is here:https://github.com/internetarchive/wayback/tree/master/wayback-cdx-serverHowever, please note that there are errors in the documentation regarding the regex filtering syntax.

archive.org geocities scrapes go back to 1996, so it is plausible it could have survived:

https://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=geocities.com&mat...

If you ever remember any of the details, the CDX API can probably help.

https://github.com/internetarchive/wayback/blob/master/wayba...

Query the Internet Archive’s CDX server for this info.

https://github.com/internetarchive/wayback/blob/master/wayba...

Archive.org has a cdx server you can quickly request information from: https://github.com/internetarchive/wayback/tree/master/wayback-cdx-server

Are the contents of these WARCs available as part of the Wayback Machine itself? If so, you might be able to use the CDX server to discover and download the content.

Wayback API to get a list of all versions of the page (https://github.com/internetarchive/wayback/tree/master/wayback-cdx-server#basic-usage).

Long time ago, I did sth similar, i.e. made a screenshot every few seconds, with the purpose to automatically extract information from it, e.g. how long I was using some app.

I wrote a PNG DB to split PNG images into many blocks and have each block stored in a DB. If there are several equal blocks, it is only stored once. Via a hash table, the lookup for such blocks is made fast. With this PNG DB, I have a compression rate of about 400-500%. https://github.com/albertz/png-db

Some of the scripts I used to analyze the screenshots are here, but in the end, it was not really so successful and reliable: https://github.com/albertz/screenshooting

In the end, that lead to another project, where I just was storing that information more directly, i.e. what application was in the foreground, what file was open. https://github.com/albertz/timecapture

See my other post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34566857

I wrote a DB for PNG files which deduplicates PNG blocks (only exact matchs): https://github.com/albertz/png-db