>Hopefully they are also making substantial donations to the Internet Archive, since they will be directing a lot of traffic into it and basically using their infrastructure as a feature on their main product

WebArchive link is hidden so deep in the "About the source" page that vast majority of Google users won't even know that it exists.

There is excellent browser extension called Web Archives[0] that hooks all major web archiving services e.g. Archive.is, Wayback Machine and others in one place.

[0] https://github.com/dessant/web-archives

It'd be absolutely foolish if the agreement wasn't contingent on funding. I assume the reason it's not explicitly stated was some sort of NDA (since IA is also involved in turmoil and Google doesn't want to be part of that).

I hope Google is NOT going to be a significant source of funding for the Internet Archive. Because I want to trust Wayback Machine and the Internet Archive to be unbiased.

Google likes to influence search results, hiding ones it doesn't like, and elevating those that the Company supports. Wayback Machine has been very reliable so far, I hope it stays that way.

IA needs an alternative - an independent backup archive - more than it needs funding. Unless IA funding exceeds the entire US copyright lobbying industry there is always a chance they will cease to exist without enough notice to save the data somewhere else.

There is also the matter what IA will be able to archive. The the machine learning gold rush more and more site operators see dollar bills in front of them and are restricting who can crawl their content. Google is in a special position here because almost no one can affort not to be crawled by Google which is what made their cache especially valuable in addition to the IA.