Election lives on, online

Remember Go Pat Go? Well, Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan is long gone, but his presidential campaign Web site lives on at Election 2000, An Internet Library.

Commissioned by the Library of Congress, the online library features more than 1,000 election-related Web sites, including sites operated by George W. Bush, Al Gore, Ralph Nader, Harry Browne and their political parties. It also has news Web sites frozen on Nov. 7.

In all, there are 2 terabytes of data—some 87 million pages of online election material—gathered from Aug. 1, 2000, to Jan 21, 2001. They can be found at archive.alexa.com.

The library was compiled by Alexa Internet, a San Francisco company that creates massive digital collections of Web sites and other Internet information. Alexa created a "time browser" it calls a Wayback Machine that enables visitors to the election library site to "retrieve Web sites out of the past," according to Brewster Kahle, Alexa president.

It's possible to search the library by Web address or to search specific sites by date, down to the hour and second.

Alexa worked with Compaq Computer Corp. and the Internet Archive (www. archive.org), a nonprofit organization that develops Internet libraries, to create Election 2000. Compaq took on the task of crawling hundreds of political Web sites each day to gather material for the library, Kahle said.

The online library is intended to give researchers, historians, scholars and the public free access to a digital record of the election. The site displays the famous quote from philosopher George Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."