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What is the Wayback Machine?

The Wayback Machine is a digital archive created and run by the Internet Archive Organization, that allows users to travel "back to the past" to see what a website used to look like at a specified date. The Wayback Machine preserves older versions of and/or decommissioned webpages to help retain access for future generations. Essentially, the site captures snapshots of how a website used to be at a specific period of time. The Wayback Machine began caching websites starting in 1995 and as of 2024 has stored about 916 billion webpages. 

How do I use the Wayback Machine?

Head to https://web.archive.org/

Have a website URL that you'd like to look for ready to go. The basic site or a specific webpage is fine. Try to keep the URL as straight forward as possible. Enter the URL into the main search box. 

 

Once you have entered a URL, the site will bring you to a page called the Calendar view. This allows you to see what days a specific website was archived on. The top bar above the calendar images allows you to select a specific year and gives you an estimate (in bar graph form) of how often the site was captured. 

A monthly calendar view of the amount of times a website was crawled by the Wayback Machine is shown below. 

Once you have chosen the timeframe that you wish to view - click on a specific day and open the time stamp. Once selected the Wayback Machine will transport you back in time to see what the page looked like and what information it housed during that time. You can then browse the old website for needed information. 

 

You can also browse the scrolling images of popular webpages or use any of the 4 categories of the site listed under the main search box. These categories include: Tools, Subscription Service, Collection Search, and Save New Page. 

  • The Tools categories allows you to find specific plug-ins to add to your web browser for active archiving.
  • The Subscription Service Category allows you to use Archive-It -  "Archive-It enables you to capture, manage and search collections of digital content without any technical expertise or hosting facilities"
  • Collection Search allows you to search specific indexed collections such as Government PDFs, Terms of use pages, or other sites. 
  • Save Page Now allows users to capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

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If you have suggestions for how to make this page better, please contact Elizabeth Jerow, Library Director (jerow@msoe.edu).