Wow. A large chunk of the web just died. As if the echoes of millions of past websites cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened
The [indexed] web died before that because Google is already "forgetting" things in the indexer that were always there. I bet that Google/Alphabet already knows that these are the last shots. I don't think it is a coincidence that the first rows of search results are full of ads and it is very difficult to detect the first organic result.
One of the things I've come to really enjoy in Brave is its "Show Wayback Machine prompt on 404 pages" feature. I know this is tangental to your point, but I felt it still worth noting.
I'm finding it harder and harder to search for things from recent history.
They killed reverse image search for Lens, which is borderline useless.
Image search no longer has its date range filter. You can still use the undocumented keyword, but who knows when they'll take that away.
Search results are increasingly irrelevant. Yesterday, I was searching for news articles about the late 00s capture of an Al Qaeda leader who was tracked down in an unusual way. Amongst the results were Visa's careers page. (As a side note, I then asked ChatGPT about the event and it hallucinated in all 3 of my attempts.)
Keep in mind that although the Wayback Machine (Archive.org / Internet Archive) will accept archival requests through a simple URL submission[1], Archive.Today does not and AFAIU requires at least some manual interaction to complete an archive request. Archive.Today also rate-limits submissions and will through up CAPTCHA tests if you're exceeding rates (though so long as you're retaining cookies, though seem to stay good for a while).
I've archived 100s to low 1,000s of my own personal contributions on a few online services to both sites.
For Archive Today, it is possible to expedite the archival process by generating the initial submission URL, though you'll have to complete another two steps after that point manually as I recall. If you're archiving a large set of sites, you can compile a list, generate a Web page off of that, and work through it at a pretty good clip.
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Notes:
1. The URL format being
https://web.archive.org/save/<URL-to-save>
You can submit that via a script using any HTTP request generator, e.g., curl, wget, w3m, lynx, etc.
