TalkTalk
| TalkTalk | |
| |
| URL | TalkTalk - Broadband, Fibre, TV and Calls[IA•Wcite•.today•MemWeb] |
| Status | Closing (personal web space) |
| Archiving status | Not saved yet (personal web space) |
| Archiving type | Unknown |
| IRC channel | #archiveteam (on hackint) |
TalkTalk plc is a company which provides television, telecommunications, Internet access, and mobile network services to businesses and consumers in the United Kingdom.[1]
Personal Webspace Closure
In early 2018 TalkTalk announced that their customer webspace is closing down.[2]
TalkTalk exists as a result of historic takeovers, mergers and the rebranding of defunct ISPs from as early as the 1990s. As a consequence of this, TalkTalk inherited and is responsible for managing the webspace data of four known domains. A forum post from a representative is useful for determining the quantity of webspace disappearing. A rough back-of-the-envelope estimate using search results indicates over 100,000 sites.
Four historic "branches" of webspace under different domains are going offline.
Grabbing Webspace
To gather a rough picture of the amount of sites, or at least sites indexed by search engines, we can perform a site:http://... search engine query; which outputs the following rounded results.
| Closing Domain | Google Results | Bing Results |
|---|---|---|
| http://website.lineone.net/~USERNAME/ | 11,000 | 13,000 |
| http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/USERNAME/ | 54,000 | 36,000 |
| http://www.USERNAME.dsl.pipex.com/ | 14,000 | 15,000 |
| http://www.USERNAME.talktalk.net/ | 51,000 | 25,000 |
It is confirmed that data on these domains will no longer be accessible on July 16, 2018. From Web 1.0 Family History Sites, War Memorials, Local Businesses to Village Cricket Teams, many sites hold history.
Ideas
Scrape search engines for full site URLs
For every URL found, curl http://web.archive.org/save/[URL]
Use Wayback API to gather list of already partially archived images or pages, and archive the root site fully
Older (lineone, tiscali and pipex era) sites should likely take priority? These are often old and very "Web 1.0"