Google Search starts offering easy access to old versions of web pages
Before you go judging those 20-year-old sites, remember what your wardrobe looked like in 2004.
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- Google Search is starting to integrate links to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
- The Wayback Machine stores cached copies of websites for historical reference, some going back decades.
- The tool’s also useful for when a site’s down, letting you still access its content.
So much of our digital lives is dominated by novelty — what’s new, what’s trending, what’s viral — that it can be easy to lose sight of how important it often is to also have a clear, easily accessible record of the past. And while Google Search can help us find older information, even it only goes so far. For anyone doing serious research online, the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine have been an invaluable resource of past web content, caching pages over the years. Now that powerful tool is coming to Google itself, as Search starts integrating links to the Wayback Machine.
If you’ve never used Wayback before, you’re in for a treat: Just head over to the Wayback Machine, enter the URL you’d like to visit, and you’ll get a list of each time the service crawled the site, scraping and saving its content. Not everything works perfectly — you’ll run into plenty of broken media — but it’s great fun checking out what your favorite sites were up to ten, or even twenty years ago.
