The Internet archive is a full, free library of data, information, and other stuff.
It dates from 1996 (As far as I checked) to 2009. The main goal or 'mission' of the project was to:
"The Archive will provide historians, researchers, scholars, and others access to this vast collection of data and, ensure the longevity of this information." -www.archive.org (Oct 11, 1997)The archive collects data by a crawler (That was donated by Alexa Internet) that follows links it finds on sites, copys the sites pages and files, puts it in the archive, and if it finds a new link on the page, it is followed, and the whole cycle starts over again. The Archive gathers around 100 Gigabytes of data per day (Thats half the size of my hard-drive).
Heres some example sites:
www.lego.com - (1996)www.google.com - Google Prototype(1998)www.yahoo.com - (1996)www.youtube.com - (2005)www.windows.com - Where do you want to go today? (1997)www.blockland.us - That game where you build with Legos (2005)www.archive.org - The Internet Archive (1997)
Although even as a Internet Archive, not everything is recorded. If there is a password protected website, it is not recorded. If the page was 404'd during the recording process, it is not recorded. Not even searches are recorded. Searching is impossible in the archive.
