The Internet never forgets? That’s right, because with the Wayback Machine you can also find websites that have been offline for a long time. We explain how the Internet archive works.
The first website went live more than 30 years ago, and billions of websites have since been added. These are constantly changing, being updated or even taken off the web altogether.
If you want to access an earlier version of a website or one that no longer exists, you can do this with the Wayback Machine. Here you can search for old websites just like in an archive.
How does the Wayback Machine work?
On the Wayback Machine website, you can search through “more than 866 billion saved web pages” over the years. For your search, you either need the URL of the page you want to trace. You can also enter words in the search that are related to the URL of a website.
If you enter something in the search, the archive spits out a calendar, among other things. Here you can see when and on which days recordings of the site were made for the Internet Archive.
You can click on them to see the status of the website at that time. You can also jump back and forth between the years. A chart on a timeline also shows you how often the corresponding page was recorded in a year.
View changes on a website
But the Wayback Machine has not only recorded websites at certain points in time. Here you can also view the changes that have been made to the respective websites.
To do this, you need to select two different points in time in a calendar. If you then click on “Compare”, the Wayback Machine compares the status of the page at the respective points in time.
You can then scroll through both pages, which are displayed next to each other. The page then marks the changes in blue and yellow.
Wayback Machine also allows gimmicks
The Wayback Machine can be useful for researchers, for example, if they want to investigate the reporting of a particular historical event. But the Internet archive can also be useful for gimmicks.
If you look at the Hulu.com website in the Internet archive, for example, you will find an amazing story. Today, the website is home to the streaming service of the same name.
But if you go further back in time with the help of the Wayback Machine, you will find a woman’s private website – cat content included.
