Wayback Machine

Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web and other information on the Internet. It was launched in 2001 by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California, United States. The service allows users to see archived versions of web pages across time, which the archive calls a "three dimensional index".

History

The Wayback Machine was created as a joint effort between Alexa Internet and the Internet Archive when a team at Alexa Internet, working on building a back-end for Alexa's web directory, developed a way to store, catalog, and retrieve large amounts of data. The team decided to use this technology to build the Wayback Machine.

Functionality

The Wayback Machine uses web crawlers to download and save web pages for archival purposes. When a user enters a URL into the Wayback Machine, it displays a list of dates the site was crawled. The user can then select a date to view an archived version of the site from that time.

The Wayback Machine does not capture or archive all web pages or websites. Some sites may be excluded due to robots.txt files, while others may be excluded because they were not crawled or because they are password protected.

Uses

The Wayback Machine has been used in various legal cases for evidence of what a website looked like at a certain time, and by researchers studying the web. It is also used by people who want to see what a website looked like in the past or to retrieve information that has been removed from the current version of a website.

Criticism and limitations

The Wayback Machine has been criticized for its inability to archive everything on the web, its potential for misuse, and issues around copyright and privacy. It also cannot capture some types of content, such as dynamic pages, forms, or pages that are triggered by a user action.

See also

• Internet Archive
• Alexa Internet
• Web archiving
• Digital preservation

External links

• Official website