#StandWithUkraine
Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko —  — Web — archive, backup, google, wikipedia

Did you know Internet has an archive?

wayback_machine_icon Internet changes all the time. Thousand of sites appear and disappear. Those sites that survive go through plenty of changes. Wouldn’t it be cool to see those old or retired versions? Internet Archive Wayback Machine maintains a backup of Internet you can look at.

What it does

Wayback Machine crawls Internet and archives all sites it sees (excluding those that have settings forbidding spidering and archiving of content). Archives are processed, sorted by date and accurately stored. With completely free access you can take a look at how any archived site looked in the past.

wayback_machine_archive

Result are also completely linkable for ease of use. Ancient Google with ugly logo? Wikipedia running on original Usemod engine? It’s like child photo album for web.

Slow pace

Unlike search engines that aspire for near-realtime updates Wayback Machine takes time. After site gets crawled it will take months for it to be processed and included in archive.

Overall

Proejct does work that doesn’t seem real. However it works, works fine and offers you excellent research tool.

Link http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

Blog http://wa.archive.org/blog/

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13 Comments

  • Madmouse Blog #

    It was interesting to see some of the history of madmouse.com because it is over eleven years old. It brought back some memories, some good and some not so good.

  • Rarst #

    @Madmouse Wow, eleven years is a looong time online. :) Impressive. I hadn't messed with publishing for years after I got online, so my longest running online estate dates to 2003 I think. I hope this blog sticks around for decade or few. :)

  • Madmouse Blog #

    @Rarst - You just got to hang in there through the good and bad times and not give up. If something doesn't workout right, regroup and try again. That is what I did. Crazy, over eleven years. Seems like just yesterday.

  • Rarst #

    @Madmouse I am more afraid to get bored, I rotate most of my hobbies every few years.

  • Farrhad A #

    When i see aviationearth.com or farrhad.com, brings back good old memories, of how pathetic my sites were when I was 12 years old! :D

  • Rarst #

    @Farrhad Heh, people don't start awesome. :) I am bit afraid to look at posts from only months ago here. What would I think about them after few years.

  • Farrhad A #

    @Rarst haha Ya! I had valued AE a few months ago....it was 150$ after the redesign it was sold for 1200$ :)

  • Ben Tremblay #

    I really love this tool and use it once it a while when I'm curious about how a website looked like a couple of years ago! ;) Google and Yahoo! are particularly interesting to look at...

  • TechZoomIn #

    Rarst, I know this one and i will use it very often to see some sites. It's site from alexa and Amazon i guess.Very useful site man.

  • Rarst #

    @Ben Yeah, Google is just too cute... Not. :) @Lax It's connected to Alexa but Internet Archive itself is nonprofit organization.

  • Nihar #

    Great to know about this. Let me check whether my blog is archived or not.

  • Nihar #

    Rarst, I can see the archived copy from December 2007, when i started this site. But donno why the archive has stopped. after Feb 2007. what could be the reason?

  • Rarst #

    @Nihar No idea. Your blog is properly indexed by Google, right? SO settings are fine. it may be simply slow - inclusion of archive copy to index may take 6-12 month according to them.