The internet is constantly evolving.Websites and their information disappear to give place to the new. The Wayback Machine is a digital time capsule that preserves snapshots of websites across the years. This article will show you how to use this invaluable historical resource.
The Wayback Machine search engine is where you should head first to look for archived webpages and sites. The search box is also prominent on The Internet Archive's homepage. Click the Wayback Machine logo to go to its main page.
The Wayback Machine search field works like any other search engine. The site ranks search results by how often the site was saved and how many related links each homepage has.
In the Wayback Machine's search bar, type the URL of the website you're interested in. You can use the domain URL (e.g., www.example.com) or a specific page on the site.
The result is displayed as a Calendar with a timeline with years on the top and the monthly view of that specific year.
The calendar view shows the number of times the Wayback Machine checked a site; it doesn't show how many updates the page received.
Mouse over any date to see snapshots from that day. Choose the time for the snapshot. The size of the circles is proportional to the number of snapshots on that date. You may also see different colors of circles:
For best results, only click blue links.
Navigate the site on the snapshot. As you aren't looking at a live page, some links may not work. Also, the search function on the archived site won't work as it does on its live counterpart.
You can't download a snapshot from the Wayback Machine directly; their Terms of Use do not allow it.
Although the Wayback Machine works only with URLs, it has a limited ability to search with keywords. However, these keywords are for entire sites and not ones buried in an individual webpage.
For example, if you use a keyword like "global warming," you will not get every page with that word. Instead, you will get websites about global warming.
When you do a keyword search, you'll have to look through the results to find the site you're searching for. It's still a great way to discover old sites with relevant information, such as academic journals.
Wayback Machine also supports multilingual keyword searches along with the site search operator (e.g., site:nytimes.com "global warming").
With theSave Page Nowfeature, you can add and archive webpages to the Wayback Machine. However, you can't save entire websites yet, just a related number of pages (via the outlinks on your target page).
Go to the Wayback Machine home page.
Type the URL of the page you want to archive in theSave Page Nowfield.
If you don't see this field, make sure you're atweb.archive.organd not justarchive.org.
SelectSave Page.
Registering and logging in with a free account gives a few more options, like saving screenshots of a page, keeping a personal web archive, the ability to email search results to yourself, and use of WACZ files.
If you regularly use the Wayback Machine, consider their Chrome extension. The extension is an indirect way to "search" the Wayback Machine, as you can automatically view archived pages of a site by clicking on it. It's a helpful way to see cached pages if the webpage you are trying to access does not exist or displays a 404 Not Found Error. Check the extension's Settings for extra features. Extensions and add-ons are also available for Safari, Edge, and Firefox.
The Wayback Machine is part of the Internet Archive, which Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat founded in 1996 as a non-profit organization to preserve the World Wide Web and create a searchable public library of digital assets. Since then, the Internet Archive has grown to include millions of free books, movies, software, music, art, video games, etc.
Other publicly available resources are available, including the Open Library, a digital library of books, and the NASA Images Archive, a collection of images from NASA's archives.
The Wayback Machine was the first service to open to the public in 2001. It captures and indexes snapshots of web pages, allowing users to view a site's content as it appeared at different points in time. This tool is invaluable for researchers, historians, and anyone interested in the evolution of the internet or recovering lost content.
The Wayback Machine currently has a searchable index of 866 billion web pages. You can think of it as an invisible search engine that can find cached versions of websites that no longer exist.