One of the more frustrating aspects of the Internet is when a website shuts down. You might follow a favorite blog, bookmark helpful articles, and share interesting posts on social media.
But then one day you go to the site to discover that it’s gone. The site has been closed and doesn’t exist anymore. All of those articles you enjoyed are now gone like dust in the wind.
The good news is that you may be able to find those sites again, even after they are offline, using a site called the Wayback Machine.
The Wayback Machine keeps a history of the Internet, showing sites from the past. You can view sites that no longer exist and see older versions of existing websites and remember how they looked “back in the old days.”
What the Wayback Machine Is
The Wayback Machine is a website that shows archived versions of publicly available websites. Not all websites or versions of websites are available on the Wayback Machine, but many are.
How to Use the Wayback Machine
To see an archived website, go to the Wayback Machine website and enter the web address of the site you want to see.
For example, if you want to see the history of this website, you would enter wonderoftech.com, not The Wonder of Tech.
Click the Browse History button.
On the results page, you will see how many times the website has been archived and a calendar of when the site was saved.
You can click on a year to see the exact dates the site was saved. A blue dot on a date shows the page was saved on that day.
Click on a date with a blue dot to see what the website looked like on that date.
Here is The Wonder of Tech in 2012:
Here is Facebook in 2006:
And Google in 2004:
Saving a Website to The Wayback Machine
If you want to save a version of a website, you can do that at the bottom of the home page of the Wayback Machine. Enter the web address of the page you want saved and hit enter.
The Wayback Machine Beta Version
The Wayback Machine recently launched a beta (test) version that lets you search for archived websites by keywords. Unlike the original version, the beta version lets you enter search terms to try to find websites you can’t remember, or don’t know the web address for.
To use the beta version, go to the Beta Wayback Machine. Enter the search term and hit enter. You will see a list of results that match your term.
For example, in the Beta version, I searched “GeoCities” and was shown a list of GeoCities websites in different countries.
Note that because this version is beta the results may be buggy.
How the Wayback Machine Started
The Internet has a history, perhaps not a long one but certainly a rich one. The Wayback Machine was based on software developed in 1996 to archive websites, capturing the history of the Internet.
The website the Wayback Machine was started in 2001, using a version of that software.
Since that time the Wayback Machine has grown exponentially, much as the Internet has grown.
The site was named after the WABAC, a time machine used by cartoon characters Mr. Peabody and Sherman on The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.
Ideas for Using the Wayback Machine
As mentioned above, you can use the Wayback Machine to find closed websites, such as GeoCities that is now only available in Japan.
If you’re thinking of purchasing a domain name, check to see how it was used previously. If the site was full of spam, you may not want to use that web address for your site.
You can also see how a website looked in the past and follow the progress of its design over the years.
Have you ever wanted an archive of past websites? Have you ever been upset to find a website had closed? What websites have you searched for on the Wayback Machine?
Share your thoughts in the Comments section below!
* Memory Lane image courtesy of Bert Kaufmann via Flickr and Creative Commons
** Wayback Machine graph courtesy of Wikipedia