Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is mostly known for archiving the web, which the San Francisco-based nonprofit has done since 1996, two years before Google was founded.

It is also called the Wayback Machine and indexes over 435 billion webpages dating back to 1996. It is the largest archive of the web. The archive also hosts:

• Books. One of the world’s largest open collections of digitized books, over 6 million public domain books, and an open library catalog.
• Videos. 1.9 million videos, including classic TV, 1,300 vintage home movies, and 4,000 public-domain feature films.
• The Prelinger Archives. Over 6,000 ephemeral films, including vintage advertising, educational and industrial footage.
• Audio. 2.3 million audio recordings, including over 74,000 radio broadcasts, 13,000 78rpm records, and 1.7 million Creative Commons-licensed audio recordings.
• Live music. Over 137,000 concert recordings, nearly 10,000 from the Grateful Dead alone.
• Audiobooks. Over 10,000 audiobooks from LibriVox and more.
• TV News. 668,000 news broadcasts with full-text search.
• Scanning services. Free and open access to scan complete print collections in 33 scanning centers, with 1,500 books scanned daily.
• Software. The largest collection of historical software in the world.

Wayback Machine

Did you know there is a site that serves up web pages that are no longer active? The site is https://archive.org/web/ and is known as the Wayback Machine, because it goes way back to show pages that have long since been gone. It works kind of like Google, but for old, rather than current web pages. Interesting place to go if you are looking for old facts or to check how a story changes over time. It is especially interesting to see how politicians change their story depending on which way the wind blows.

Wayback Machine

If you are interested in what a particular web site used to look like, you can use the Wayback Machine website to help. It shows a calendar and  you pick the date you wish to see what the site looked like. I mentioned this last year, but thought it was worth mentioning again.

Some get around it and the pages are no longer available. For instance, I was looking up some info from the Obama campaign where he answered questions that were sent in. The pages have all been replaced with a page that sends you to the whitehouse.gov site. LINK  Seems the answers from back then might not be the same today and we might be confused. However, I did manage to find a way to the original site by another means.