The Wayback Machine – what websites looked like in the past

The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web, created by the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization. It allows users to access archived versions of web pages across time, providing a valuable resource for understanding the history of a website or the evolution of content on the Internet. The Wayback Machine went live on October 24, 2001.

The Internet Archive, which runs the Wayback Machine, is primarily funded through donations from individuals, corporations, and foundations. It also receives support from revenue generated by services like web crawling, data hosting, and digitization services provided to other institutions.

The Wayback Machine can be interesting and useful to business people in several ways:

1. Market research: By exploring the historical development of competitors’ websites or industry-related sites, businesses can gain insights into market trends, past strategies, and industry evolution. This can inform their own decision-making and help identify opportunities for growth.
2. Intellectual property protection: Businesses can use the Wayback Machine to verify the existence of prior art, establish the original publication date of content, or identify potential copyright infringement.
3. Website recovery: If a company loses its website data due to technical issues, the Wayback Machine can be used to recover previous versions of the website and potentially restore lost content.
4. Brand reputation management: By monitoring how their online presence has evolved over time, businesses can identify potential areas for improvement, as well as better understand how their brand has been perceived by the public.

It’s really easy to use.

1. Visit https://web.archive.org/
2. Look for the search box, top-middle. Type in the website address you’d like view, and hit enter. In the example screenshot below we’re searching for Microsoft.com.
3. Pick a year (e.g. 2004), hover your mouse pointer over one of the bubbles (e.g. February 2, 2004), and click on a time ‘snapshot’ (e.g. 6:27:22).
4. The old website in question will then be displayed. You can even click around the website to view sub-pages. It’ll work… some of the time!

Hint: popular, high-profile, high-traffic websites are saved/archived by the Wayback Machine very frequent. All other sites, less so.