Inside the old church where one trillion webpages are being saved

Just blocks from the Presidio of San Francisco, the national park at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge, stands a gleaming white building, its façade adorned with eight striking Gothic columns.

But what was once the home of a Christian Scientist church is now the holy grail of Internet history — the Internet Archive, a nonprofit library run by a group of software engineers and librarians, who for nearly 30 years have been saving the web one page at a time.

Inside the stained-glass-adorned sanctuary, the sounds of church sermons have been replaced by the hum of servers, where the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine preserves webpages.

The Wayback Machine, a tool used by millions every day, has proven critical for academics and journalists searching for historical information on what corpo