What Is Wayback Machine and Why Is It Called a Digital Archive?

If you are looking for one of those old-school vintage content on the internet, Wayback Machine can be a lifesaver. Because as of now, they have saved and preserved over 802 billion web pages. So, chances are that your favorite website from when you were a school-going kid is one of them. 

So, what is Wayback Machine? Well, the Wayback Machine works like a search engine, and archives blog posts and web pages to provide public access to previously archived content. Using this, you can find web contents that are no longer available on the internet.

Continue reading below to learn more about the WayBack Machine and its limitations.

What is the Wayback Machine

The Wayback Machine is a digital record room of websites, snapshots of web pages, or internet contents across time. It can be called a time capsule of the internet as anyone can see how a particular website looked in the past to the present through the machine.

The Wayback Machine works as a search engine and recovers missing posts, pages, and content for you; besides it gives you access to archive your web pages automatically or manually. By doing this, you are contributing to the future culture, heritage, research, and technology of the next generation.

This digital archive of websites is founded by a nonprofit organization named the Internet Archive. Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat are the founders of the Wayback Machine, and they intended to provide “universal access to all knowledge” by storing archived copies of expired web pages.

Improvement of Wayback Machine Over Time

The database of cached web pages was kept recorded in a digital tape from 1996 to 2001. Yet, it was a clunky database and only accessible to researchers and scientists. The founders give universal access to the public to archive the entire World Wide Web in 2001.

In 2001, there occurred a problem when website contents vanished immediately after the page gets changed or shut down. This problem has been solved after the launch of Wayback Machine by archiving web pages in a three-dimensional index.

With the development of technology, the Wayback Machine’s storage capacity has grown up as now websites can be stored manually. When a website’s URL is entered into the search box of the machine, it automatically crawls it and captures it and there is also a ‘Save Page Now’ button.

The Wayback Machine was launched with 10 billion archived pages in 2001 but it has contained over 25 petabytes of data in 2018. At present days, a large cluster of Linux nodes by Internet Archive is used to archive data.

What Is the Use of The WayBack Machine?

The Wayback Machine has been made accessible to all for many reasons like verification of news, keeping references, etc. One can find old software programs, old information, survey data, or many other things for the sake of his research. You might be interested to know how to use the Wayback Machine.

The changes of a particular website can also be observed with the Wayback Machine, as it preserves old versions of many well-known websites. This digital archive is doing a great job for scholars, and journalists as it stores closed websites, previous news reports, and changes in website contents and collects data as well as for the present pages contained in its archive.

Features of the Wayback Machine

The Wayback Machine has some different features and a search tool is one of the most important of them as mainly everyone searches for content in this machine. Another excellent feature is whether a website has been shut down or not, the contents of that site are accessible or downloadable.

Most of the time it archives a page by keeping its hyperlinks active. These hyperlinks increase the stability of the machine by saving slightly more than half of the online scholarly publications.

How Does it Work

The Wayback Machine usually archives a webpage by using some spidering or web crawling software. The Alexa program, a toolbar on the computer provides a website domain when the web crawling software identifies it. After that, the contents are cataloged and retrieved and thus archived as a webpage.

The process of archiving pages follows specific criteria, but it does not mean everything gets permission to be recorded on the Wayback Machine. Some domains cannot save their content by recording a “no crawl” message instead of its archive snapshots. Usually, the contents of websites get stored as HTML files or captured snapshots, or related external files like image files.

Missing contents of a specific website can be recovered in the Wayback Machine as it can substitute them by linking similar content to the other sources. But this is not always happened, in some cases, the machine doesn’t display anything for missing contents or may show blank pages.

Some limitations of the Wayback Machine

The Wayback Machine is an advanced searching technology for archived webpages, but still, now it has some limitations. Though the lag time is reduced nowadays compared with the previous years, it is still 3 to 10 hours. The search facility of this machine is also limited because of the limitation of the web crawler.

Again, the webpages archived in the websites cannot save contents written in JavaScript or other languages as web crawlers cannot extract contents not written in HTML. Sometimes this breaks hyperlinks and removes images. Web crawler doesn’t permit saving progressive web application also because they need a link to the host website.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it safe to use the Wayback Machine?

Yes, it is safe to use Wayback Machine. Although your browser might show you a warning about loading a webpage from an unauthenticated source, if you aren’t using an outdated web browser, you are safe from being intercepted by any unauthorized personnel.

Does Wayback Machine ever delete?

The Wayback Machine will only delete a webpage when you claim its ownership. Keep in mind that your ownership counts from the moment you have bought a domain, not before that. So, anything saved by Wayback before your purchase will still be there.

What is the difference between Google cache and Wayback Machine?

Both Google cache and Wayback machine take snapshots but they have different sets of criteria. Google cache only keeps the most recent snapshot of a webpage. The Wayback Machine, on the other hand, takes periodical snapshots over time.

Conclusion

Even with its limitations, the Wayback Machine provides an excellent opportunity to find and view older content. It can come in especially handy to see what popular websites were like in their earlier states. Also, for fact-checking and authenticating information, the necessity of the Wayback Machine is undeniable. Thanks for reading.