The Wayback Machine. - How To See Versions of Websites From The Past

[Kelly]

The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web that is maintained by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California. The Wayback Machine was launched in 2001 as a way to preserve and make accessible the history of the web.

The Wayback Machine works by periodically crawling the web and storing copies of web pages in its archive. These copies, or "snapshots," can then be accessed through the Wayback Machine's user interface, allowing users to see what a particular website looked like at a specific point in time.

The Wayback Machine has been used by researchers, historians, and the general public to access and preserve the history of the web. It is an important tool for understanding the evolution of the internet and the role that websites have played in shaping our world.

The URL of the Wayback Machine is https://archive.org/web/. To use the Wayback Machine, simply enter the URL of the website you want to access in the search bar on the Wayback Machine homepage and select a date range. The Wayback Machine will then show you a calendar view of all the snapshots it has saved of that website within the specified date range. You can then click on a specific snapshot to view the website as it looked on that date.

For example, if you wanted to see how the New York Times website looked in January 2000, you could enter "www.nytimes.com" in the Wayback Machine search bar and select the date range "January 1, 2000 - January 31, 2000." The Wayback Machine would then show you a calendar view of all the snapshots it has saved of the New York Times website from that month, and you could click on a specific snapshot to view the website as it looked on that date.