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> Can we talk about how cool the Wayback Machine Compare feature is?

I consider myself an Internet Archive power-user; I spend hours playing with CDX queries, t̶r̶o̶l̶l̶i̶n̶g̶ trawling the archive for interesting tidbits that have been lost to time. I have spent countless evenings building scripts based on the internetarchive (https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive) and iamine (https://github.com/jjjake/iamine) tools (along with a host of others).

I am utterly ashamed I had never heard of the /diff/ feature between pages until I read your article. Thank you for bringing this to my attention! I am continuously impressed by the work they do at IA.




Did you mean trawling the archive?


While trawling is more idiomatic, trolling is also a verb, and actually quite similar: it's fishing with a moving vessel except that it uses lines rather than nets.

In my headcanon, trolling is a slower, less directed process. So I might idly troll for bugs to fix on a bug tracker, rather than a trawl which would aim to gather everything matching some criteria.


Yes, yes I did. I'm not even sure I can blame that on autocorrect.

EDIT: As an aside, I didn't realize there's no strikethrough option for text on HN. For anyone else who wants to hide their shame without ninja editing, I found this site which does the same in unicode:

https://yaytext.com/strike/


"Trolling: Carefully and systematically search an area for something."

I think your subconscious did just fine.


It's polite, pedantic, and incredibly useful digressions like this which keep me coming back to HN. I had no idea this homonym could describe two separate actions (i.e. casting a broad net to grab whatever is in the path vs. a systematic search covering a specified area) that both still work perfectly to describe how I interact with the Internet Archive.

I'd say it was intentional, but that'd be a bald-faced lie.




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