Friday, August 9, 2019

Archive.org

You needn't pay a lot for content - in fact nothing at all.  And you need not sit through hours of commercials, either.  There is a lot of free content on the Internet, but it isn't easy to find.

Google has some sort of new algorithm which gives me the results it thinks I should look at, instead of what I want to see.  So, for example, if I try to search for one of my old blog postings, it is nearly impossible to find it.  Blogger only lets me search back two years, so I have to use Google to find things older than that.   But today, usually Google gives two relevant results and the rest are ads or unrelated to my blog.

I first found out about Archive.org while searching for old automobile magazines.  Google opened up a rift in the matrix and let me see non-sponsored content (no doubt they have fixed this bug since then).  It also displayed something called "additional collections" and that lead me down the rabbit hole to things such as five hours of zen trantric music or a collection of manga comics.

They have millions upon millions of documents, videos, audio, and other forms of content and media on the site - more than you can possibly consume in a lifetime.   And it's all free - a price I like when free really is free, and not just some come-on to join a monthly subscription service.

Of course, Archive.org is the home of the infamous wayback machine, which allows you to search for old postings and materials that were thought to be lost to the ether years ago (anything you say on the Internet, is, sadly, forever, whether you want it to be or not).  And apparently they make money from a subscription service that allows you to designate your site to be archived with regularity.

But if you bother to look, there are a lot of things to read, watch, and listen to, without having to pay monthly subscription service fees or 99 cent download fees or worse yet, $7.99 to download a book.

Yea, stick it in Jeff Bezos' eye!