As Google abandons its past, Internet archivists step in to save our collective memory

[Commentary] Google wrote its mission statement in 1999, a year after launch, setting the course for the company’s next decade: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” For years, Google’s mission included the preservation of the past. In the last five years, starting around 2010, the shifting priorities of Google’s management left archival projects in limbo, or abandoned entirely.

Recently, Larry Page said the company’s outgrown its 14-year-old mission statement. Its ambitions have grown, and its priorities have shifted. Google in 2015 is focused on the present and future. Its social and mobile efforts, experiments with robotics and artificial intelligence, self-driving vehicles and fiber optics. As it turns out, organizing the world’s information isn’t always profitable. Projects that preserve the past for the public good aren’t really a big profit center. Old Google knew that, but didn’t seem to care. Google may have dropped the ball on the past, but fortunately, someone was there to pick it up. The Internet Archive is mostly known for archiving the web, a task the San Francisco-based nonprofit has tirelessly done since 1996.

[Baio is an American technologist and blogger]