Often when I try to look up information I once found online or return to a site I had bookmarked, I discover that the page has changed or is dead. Web sites are so fleeting that I frequently wish we could go back in time.
And thanks to the Wayback Machine, we can travel back in Internet time.
The Wayback Machine is a searchable index of historical screenshots of Web sites. The site is run by The
Internet Archive, a non-profit working with the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian to prevent the Internet and other digital materials from disappearing into the ether.
The Wayback Machine claims to have indexed 10 billion Web pages, or more than 100 terabytes of information. That’s about a million megabytes — five times the amount of information in the Library of Congress!
You can use this to look up past versions of just about any site going back to 1996 — a great tool not only for digging up links that have gone bad, but for verifying information.
Last week, Web surfers discovered that Scripps Howard News Service had prepared an obituary for Ronald Reagan’s death and foolishly published it online. Once the URL began popping up on Web logs across the Internet, Scripps Howard took it down. But thanks to the WayBack Machine, those curious — or those writing articles about it — can still view part of it.
The Wayback Machine also puts together fascinating special collections.
The Sept. 11 package includes thousands of Web sites from that tragic day, including more than a dozen versions of MSNBC.com’s and CNN.com’s cover pages.
Among the featured pages in the Web pioneers collection are: Yahoo! in 1996, The White House in 1996, Amazon.com in 1996.
The Wayback Machine also has handy special collections for the 1996 and 2000 presidential elections.
The Internet Archive has also launched a Beta (test) version of a sister site, the Television Archive. Its first collection includes Sept. 11 television news broadcasts from around the world.
This site could keep you busy for hours. Just make sure you don’t get so engrossed in it that your job becomes ancient history.
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