Website review : Wayback machine, Archived internet

Ever wanted to travel back in time and experience how internet grew in leaps and bounds. Or wanted to take a reminiscence of special sites that once existed but due to pressures of time, have shut down. As Web changes constantly, and sometimes you have a website that had just the information you needed urgently is not available today. At other times you may want to see how a website content or structure/design has progressed over time.

The Internet Archive is a non-profit online-application that is founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. The Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections, and provides specialized services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities. The archives are maintained from late 1996 to 8-14 months ago, Often includes cached images, CSS, and JavaScript.

 

website review wayback machine alternative archive previous versions
Wayback machine

How to use it

    1. Go to Wayback Machine – Web Site
    2. Type the site you want to revist in past
    3. Click on “Take Me Back” button
    4. Choose the year you want to visit, and then choose the date
    5. Check out how the site looked as of that date!!

 

 

Apple-Site_Screen_Shot2_Wayback_Machine-Search-150x150
Apple site screenshot (Step 4)

Apple-Site_Screen_Shot3_Wayback_Machine-Search-150x150

 

Screen details of wayback machine search
Apple Cache dates (result of Step 3)

Used for

  • Legal cases : The evidence from the wayback machine has been submitted by lawyers as proof.
  • Patent registration :  Evidence from the wayback machine is accepted by the US Patent office,
  • Copyright issues : Checking on sites for online scams or frauds. To find out if somebody is trying to cover up past publications
  • Progress : Check out how a particular site has progressed over time.

 

Alternative Sites

  • Heritrix Internet Archive’s open-source, extensible, web-scale, archival-quality web crawler project.
  • webcitation.org : Launched in late 2005, Archives Web pages cited in certain health journal articles. No text search access.

 

References
  1. Visually Travel Back In Internet Time by Ryan (Oct 2011)
  2. Wayback Machine – Wikipedia