Wayback Machine Lets You See Past of Websites

Wayback Machine is your ticket to world-wide web’s past, letting you browse the archives of almost all  your favorite websites. It provide a fascinating way to reminisce the websites which may be an enjoyable way of passing time, specially for geeks.

Closer Look

The goal of Wayback Machine is to preserve the history of the web in a searchable and interactive manner. It record the content of websites for each year of their existence since 1996, providing a fascinating picture of past.

Using Wayback Machine is pretty simple. To use wayback Machine simply type address of a website or webpage in the search filed, and click on “Take Me Back” button. Upon clicking “Take Me Back’” button, you’ll be presented with a timeline and a calendar below it. The Timeline show you volume of grabs that Wayback Machine did each year while calendar allow you to see archived pages for a particular day.  You will notice different size of circles on different dates, which indicate how many times Wayback Machine crawled the website. Larger the circle, more is the number of snapshots or archived version of a website.

Click on any date on the calendar to see what your favorite website looked like that day. Here is Howtogeek on Nov 26, 2006. And, you can switch between different dates via timeline in the upper right corner.

Wayback Machine Use

a) To see website or web services which are no longer active or online.

b) If you are just starting your own website or blog, this site will give you inspiration dose by letting you see the evolution of your competitor’s site design and content over the years. Then, you can make changes to your site if things are not working out expected.

I’m impressed with what Wayback Machine is doing, this site is an invaluable resource with massive amount of archived information to browse online. And, it defiantly worth a try. Visit Wayback Machine.

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