Internet Archive/Wayback Machine

Hi All,

Welcome to the past!  Or, the past is prologue. Whatever the case is, readers might want to visit a site called the Internet Archive.  It is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites and more.  Or at least that's what the 'official' Internet Archive' blurb says it does. 

The Internet Archive/Wayback Machine indexes over 310 billion (yes, billion) webpages over time!!!

Users can use a particular part of the site called the 'Wayback Machine' to see what a particular website looked like at a specific date in time.  Type in a website address and up comes a timeline of the specific dates which you can see what the site looked like.  Check out some of the popular sites like Yahoo, Google or Newsday from one year ago, 5 years ago and then, if available, 10 years ago. 

It'll be absolutely clear to you that sites change and are made more user friendly over time!

The Internet Archive basically works using a spider to index a site in the past. The Internet Archive then saves the site so users can view it using the Wayback Machine.  Links on the original site do sometimes work - but the link does not go to current links.   Remember, this is just a snapshot in time of a  particular website.  Also, finding images on a page like Yahoo News can be hit or miss...

For more information on how the site actually indexes webpages, click on this Archive.org FAQ. 

For more information about the Internet Archive in general, click on this link to the FAQ.

Enjoy the links and the site and the 'older' internet!

Regards,
Stu

Internet Archive: The Wayback Machine

Hi All,

Who says that everything on the internet is always there?!  Its not.  Material get posted and then gets removed every single second of every single day.  So how are you able to find material from a few days ago - let alone a few years ago?

Great question and for that we have the Internet Archive/Wayback Machine.  With an easy url to remember - http://archive.org/web/ - its not wonder the site is so well known and so well used!

The site moniker is '456 billion web pages saved over time'.  Wow - that is almost half-a-trillion (yes, with a 't') websites.  The number looks like this 456,000,000,000.  Awesome.  And all the sites can be searched. 

Just type in a website name (businessweek, espn, Farmingdale Public Library, etc.) and you'll be directed to another page that has the url that you searched and the number of times (between a particular date the) site was first found on the Wayback Machine and the current date.

For example, a search for the Farmingdale Public Library resulted in a page that says the Wayback Machine saved the Farmingdale PL site 74 times between August 17, 2007 and March 29, 2015. 

And there is a box which enables the user to click on a particular year - and then a particular month - to choose to view the site on certain day.  Click on the blue circle of the date you are interested in and you'll see a snapshot of how the site looked on that day. 

Some notes...sometimes pictures take a bit of time to load and sometimes page links don't go to an original link.

Click on this link to learn a bit more about the Internet Archive.  Click on this link to capture a web page as it appear now for use as a trusted citation in the future!  Click on this link for a very, very extensive FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) from the Internet Archive.

And for some fun Internet Archive links, click on this link which offers over 6,000,000 fully accessible public domain ebooks.  Awesome!  Not all torrents are bad!  Click on this link to go to a page of Archive Torrents.  There is a search box for you to use on the page.

And, as if this wasn't enough, the Internet Archive has a blog, and a store, and a full-fledged organization structure.  Click on the prior links to see the particular option you are interested in.

And to think that some folks still say that 'nothing is free anymore!'.  Go figure.  They just haven't seen the Internet Archive yet!. 

Regards,
Stu