__/ [Carol W] on Tuesday 03 January 2006 06:41 \__
> On Tue, 03 Jan 2006 04:57:44 +0000, Roy Schestowitz
> <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
>>What's the benefit of permitting Alexa to crawl though? Having the site
>>archived for someone to look back at deleted content in the future? Have
>>we not learned the lesson yet?
>
> Actually it can be helpful to have an archived copy - even if that
> particular content or site becomes deleted at a later date. I have
> used the web archive to help locate some information or data that had
> been deleted or removed from the web.
>
> Carol
...But if the size of a site does not exceed gigabytes (particularly when
compressed), why not make use of private storage, which is often very
cheap. You can stack up a progressive backup for just a few quid. If re-
silience is important, you can duplicate the content periodically. The Web
Archive is slower to access and it tends to mix objects that were collect-
ed at different timepoints.
Another issue is people having access to content which was *accidently*
made public, or even find the roots of a site whose 'image' has evolved.
Having said that, the Web Archive can be useful to the user. I once wanted
to know which Palm models were considered state-of-the-art in 2002, so I
looked up the Palm front page in 2002. Going back further, it was inter-
esting to discover their old dependency on 3COM. Whether this served
/Palm/, who allowed Alexa to archive the site, remains the main question.
They could probably deny this without it being frowned upon.
Lastly, as the OP points out, Alexa can have a noticeable cost, whether
that cost is latency when serving visitors and search engines (crawlers)
or even the traffic (hosting) bill. Rarely is there something to be
gained.
Best wishes,
Roy
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