They used existing archives; the pages were actually archived earlier. But they could only incorporate the pages that had actually been archived, which was mostly major services (Geocities, ProHosting, Lycos, etc) and public institutions.
That makes sense, from why some things were captured more than others and from the pov of starting an archive service - using what’s already been done and going from there. So things that weren’t part of such a network and didn’t rank high in existing search engines really didn’t have a chance.
The Wayback Machine started saving web pages in 1996. I’ve got Geocities pages I created at the time where that’s the only way I can access them now.
The frustrating thing for me is that Wayback only saved web pages; all the Gopher pages and FTP pages just vanished.
They started in 2001 archiving pages back to 1995. I guess it was luck of the draw what got saved then.
They used existing archives; the pages were actually archived earlier. But they could only incorporate the pages that had actually been archived, which was mostly major services (Geocities, ProHosting, Lycos, etc) and public institutions.
That makes sense, from why some things were captured more than others and from the pov of starting an archive service - using what’s already been done and going from there. So things that weren’t part of such a network and didn’t rank high in existing search engines really didn’t have a chance.