What is the Wayback Machine, and how can I use it?

It’s been calculated that 90 per cent of the world’s data has been created within the last two years.

Over 402 billion gigabytes of data is generated every day, most of which is of no value or significance.

Amid this incessant torrent of new data, even worthy new contributions may unintentionally wash away older content.

Launch a flashy (though not Flash-y) new website, and the previous design vanishes as if it never existed.

Within days, search engines will have recalibrated to reflect the new content, the old pages will be permanently offline, and any content not ported across is seemingly gone forever.

That might seem unimportant in the short term, but in years to come, the loss may be more keenly felt.

This is more than just the inevitable march of progress. It’s the rewriting of history, airbrushing away Comic Sans fonts and amateurishly enthusiastic blogs as if they never existed.

One little-known yet hugely valuable resource is dedicated to ensuring the first 33 years of the World Wide Web aren’t forgotten about, even if some people would prefer otherwise…

Way away

When a website is upgraded, deleted or has its domain name ownership cancelled, you won’t be able to find it through search engines or browser history/bookmark tabs any more.

However, you might be able to find it on the Wayback Machine – a non-profit digital library of internet sites and other cultural artefacts managed by the Internet Archive.

It’s a vast compendium of webpages saved as they appeared on whichever day the machine crawled their site.

While Deep Web content (such as databases) won’t have been indexed, surface-level sub-pages are usually saved, making it possible to navigate around a site as if it were still live.

Visit the Wayback Machine, enter your preferred URL or keywords into the top search bar, and its database will interrogate over 916 billion saved web pages for results.

Website results are displayed in calendar form – the BroadbandDeals.co.uk website was first captured in October 2010 and half a dozen times throughout late 2011.

Our site has been redesigned since then, with a different colour scheme and masthead, a more intuitive widescreen layout and far greater content.

Yet the similarities between this 2010 incarnation and today’s platform are undeniable, from the Latest Deals boxout to a well-populated blog.

It’s a fascinating time capsule from an era when broadband deals cost just £6.49 per month. Those really were the days.

Use cases

The first use case for the Wayback Machine involves making historic comparisons.

You’re unlikely to remember that AOL once advertised “up to 8 meg” broadband speeds, and Google wouldn’t be able to inform you of this, yet our ‘old’ site has the answers.

This intertwines with our second use case – research.

From report generation and analysis to journalism and market research, it’s often helpful to compare ‘then’ to now using archived records.

The third use case involves obtaining deleted information which has been accidentally erased (or purposely deleted amid today’s censorious and hypersensitive culture).

The Wayback Machine unsentimentally portrays the content of past years without fear or favour.

Whether you’re tracking inflation, brand evolution or the hot-topic news stories of the day, it’s possible to lose hours revisiting pages and content you never expected to see again.

Indeed, our final use case is entertainment – the thrill of seeing primitive webpages designed for smaller monitors and slower connections, often tacky and basic yet fun and engaging.