With things shifting around the internet the past year, and also just…Having been on the internet for awhile now, I feel like this saying, while decent as a cautionary measure…May not really hold up past that. Am I being a little naive though?
Is some decade(s) old post of mine from some old forum really still floating around somewhere out there on some random old server chugging along?
I feel like even in the corporate web, a bunch of that old data’s probably been long lost courtesy of costcutting measures and businesses going under.
Web sites and pages come and go, but the search engine indices are forever. The Internet Archive, for example, uses data from a search engine crawler to populate their archive of the internet (until Alexa was shut down by Amazon, they do their own crawling now). Google likely has a lot of old internet data in archives as well.