We've got an unprecedented collection of human voices in this archive that has never been accessible to historians before. We believe that our early digital history represents an important change in how humans communicate. That is what we want to make sure is saved in a way that future scholars can make use of. Based on our archive, they've found there are over 200 human languages represented on the Internet. Xerox PARC Research Scientist Jim Pitkow couldn't reveal the details of his work, but said it had to do with what he called document ecologies.
Ecology is the study of relationships within an environment.
Pitkow noted that for his purposes, the archive represents about 2-3 terabytes of documents once you factor out things like Linex source code distribution. That's still large enough to be interesting. Given the growth of the Web, many people might have guessed that a project of this scope would be impossible, or at least so difficult that it would take a major company to accomplish. The fact that it is being done by a company of Alexa's small size is a testament to Kahle's foresight, as well as to the amazing strides in density made by magnetic storage media. Using this technology, Alexa took less than six months to record all of the text data available on public Internet sites completing the process in March of 1996.