About
Worldwide Governments Web Archive

Government Websites of the World (GWOW) was a special project done as part of Internet Archive’s 26th anniversary annual event themed around Democracy’s Library. The GWOW project’s goal is to preserve the current government websites of every country in the world to ensure perpetual access to online government information for an informed citizenry and democratic resilience. The project continues past annual event special projects by the Archiving & Data services group, such as Gifcities.org, the Military Industrial Powerpoint Complex, and the Whole Earth Web Archive.

At launch in October 2022, the GWOW collection included the government websites from over 200 countries, totaling hundreds of terabytes of data and hundreds of millions of individual government web pages and documents from the public web. Many countries have specific government second level domains (for example, gc.ca for Canada or gov.ng for Nigeria) upon which agency or government department websites are published. Building on publicly available lists, additional research, and mining the Wayback Machine, we were able to build a list of country-specific government second level domains as well as a list of known specific government websites from around the world. This best-effort "seed list" amounted to over 1.5 million websites, webpages, and domains that was archived in Summer and Fall of 2022. The resulting archive was then indexed for IA’s “media search” which enables keyword search across webpages, images, audio and video files, and PDFs. The archiving effort will continue into the future and as additional country government websites are archived, indexed, and added to the collection. If you are interested in contributing to this effort or have any questions, feel free to email us at webservices [at] archive [dot] org. Thanks for browsing the GWOW!

Credits

Engineering/Development/Crawling: Helge Holzmann & Adam Miller
Concept/Project/Research: Jefferson Bailey & Kyrie Whitsett