2026 marks 30 years of archiving the web for the Internet Archive. Last October, the Wayback Machine reached a milestone of one TRILLION webpages preserved. This work represents the creative and technical work of millions of people, ensuring that our online history is saved for the future.
But how do you visualize a trillion? One trillion books would form a stack that stretches 12.7 million kilometres into space—reaching the Moon and back 16 times (thanks, Claude!). For researchers and technologists who have spent decades archiving the web, how do you show your work to your Mom?
A project supported by the Internet Archive Europe has created a fun and interactive way to navigate through generations of web history. Based on website visualization work done by Kai Jauslin and the Swiss National Library, the code was adapted for these web displays and regionalized for different locations.
The initial display included screenshots, prepared by Internet Archive teams, of more than 85,000 Dutch websites preserved over the past 30 years. Visitors to the National Library in the Netherlands used a physical joystick and buttons to explore a variety of webpages in a game-like experience. With their voices, they can direct the machine to zoom in on specific topics or domains. The screenshots are laid out in a semantic grid, where websites with similar topics appear together in a cluster. Both topics and layout are extracted using AI–based tools.
The concept and implementation of the web display kiosks has migrated to the international Internet Archives. Displays are now in the Internet Archive US headquarters in San Francisco, in the Amsterdam offices of Internet Archive Europe, and was a highlight at the recent launch of Internet Archive Switzerland, in St Gallen.
Internet Archive Canada is pleased to announce the installation of our first Canadian web discovery kiosk, hosted by our friends at the Vancouver Public Library. Collaborating with staff from the global Internet Archives, 100,000 Canadian (.ca) websites were curated for this first version of the display. A special preview of the project was part of the Gov Info Days festivities hosted at Internet Archive Canada headquarters in Vancouver in May.
As of May 29th, the display is permanently featured on the 4th floor of the Central library branch on W Georgia St. In addition, visitors can also explore another important Internet Archive Canada project at the Vancouver Public Library, with a working Scribe station operating on the 3rd floor, where books are digitized live. The station is open Monday through Friday from 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
From preserving a trillion webpages to making them explorable through play and curiosity, our mission is ultimately about keeping our shared digital memory accessible to everyone. We hope visitors to the Vancouver Public Library will take a moment to rediscover pieces of Canada’s online past—and imagine what today’s web will mean to future generations.