While the adage goes that nothing ever disappears from the internet, anyone who created a Geocities site, or used their old university servers (or forgot to pay to renew domain registration) knows that more often than we’re led to believe, stuff goes away and we can’t find it anymore.
The Wayback Machine has been a go-to for those looking for lost content and sites on the internet, but until now the search feature has required you to know the exact URL for the site you are trying to track down. This requirement is changing, with the launch of their new Beta search function. As Andrea Peterson writes in the Washington Post:
The new search feature is not quite like Google, where all the text on each page on a website is indexed to help with searches. The Wayback Machine feature lets you search for an archived website’s main page, although it does not have the capacity to enable searches for specific web pages on that site. Once you’re there, though, you’re able to navigate around the old websites.
Petersen uses Geocities as an example, but I was interested in finding the old site for student newspaper I edited and moved online back in 1996. I could swear I had found it years ago, but could no longer track it down. I couldn’t remember the exact address, but when I searched for “usherb” -- which was part of the original URL -- I was able to find the full hosting URL http://callisto.si.usherb.ca
. This was the location where we students were able to create our own tilde sites.
Once I got there, however, I hit a roadblock. I couldn’t find /~hardcopy
, which was the title of the newspaper. Every time I tried to search for an archive, the site timed out. But once I was able to find the original URL, I was able to go back and search the original Wayback search engine and found this from 2001:
I was also able to find this from 1999 me:
The tool is still in Beta, so obviously it’s still glitchy. But it’s nice that the usability is improving.
What can you find using the Wayback Machine? How might you use this tool in your own research or teaching? Please share in the comments.
Image De Lorian by Joe Goldberg licensed CC-BY 2.0