Internet Archive

I’ve known The Internet Archive for more than a decade. Serves me a lot of times when references for difficult topics suffered some form of bit rot.

Simple to Use

Input the URL or domain like what you’ll do in Google or any search engine. Select what year and the circled dates in the calendar would point you to the archived page.

Example

Say for instance my former employer, Goabroad.com. I was there 2005 to early 2010 and I left traces in the robots.txt. I was then doing SEO though my favorite task was doing sysadmin for the company most of the time.

Let’s search for Jan 1, 2006:

If you’ll observe close enough, you’ll see what web language it used that time: yes, ColdFusion.

Stretch back a little further and you’ll see the earliest version of the site.

Other Use Cases

Your imagination is the limit. Some more use cases:

• Checking your competitor from another angle. Look at previous versions of their website. It could give you details no longer seen in current website.

• Old picture in a blog post in your employer’s site. Sometimes, due to site migrations, some details are overlooked like a picture in a blog post. Look it up in archive.org and most often, it’s there.

Happy Hunting!