A c t i o n f o r L i b r a r i e s — N o v e m b e r 2 0 0 3

The Internet Connection

By Michael Sauers

Set the Wayback Machine, Mr. Peabody
For those who don't remember Mr. Peabody and his boy, Sherman, and their time machine, don't worry. Only the name's the same. Instead of a time machine, the current Wayback Machine is a service from the Internet Archive (www.archive.org/web/web.php).

The Wayback Machine provides access to an archive of more than 30 billion — yes billion — Web pages dating back to 1996. To access the archive, all you need to do is enter the URL you're looking for and select Take Me Back. Assuming that the page you're looking for has been archived, you'll be presented with a list of dates on which the page was archived. Click on a date and see what that page looked like then. (This screenshot shows the archive years available for BCR's home page.)

This has several uses. I use it mostly for tracking the development of a Web site's design, although I've used it to find newspaper articles for which I had URLs that were no longer available on the newspaper's Web site.

Recently the Wayback Machine added two new features, both of which prompted me to write this column. The first is keyword searching of the archive. Though still in beta testing and the index covers only 11 billion pages, users can now enter keywords and find archived Web pages to match a search.

The other new feature is the Wayback Machine bookmarklet. A bookmarklet is a small script that you can set as a bookmark or quick link in your browser that will give you access to a service. By setting this book- marklet, you have the ability to click on it and automatically submit the URL you're currently visiting to the Wayback Machine, thus sparing you from having to copy the URL, go to the service and paste the URL into the proper field. (This screenshot shows where I've put the Wayback Machine bookmarklet in my browser.)

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