How the Wayback Machine Works

The Wayback machine has stored over 100 Terabytes of web pages over the last 5 years or so. For those of you technically oriented, here's a great interview with the creator, Brewster Kahle. The content is good but their current link to the archive doesn't work.

If you're surfing around the various alternative band web sites I have archived on 1079.com (Over 500) there will no doubt be occasions where the pages have been taken down a few years ago. If you get a "File not Found" type of error, here's what you do:

  1. Click your mouse on the address portion of your browser. This should change the background to blue or some other shade of color.
  2. Once the address is highlighted, go to the browsers menu bar and click on "Edit". Drag your mouse down the options and click on "copy".
  3. Type in a new address, http://www.archive.org
  4. At archive.org, click into box that has http:// already in it. Backspace over this, and then go to "Edit" again.
  5. Click on "Edit", drag your mouse down to "paste", and click!
  6. The lost page URL should now be in the box. Click on "Take me Back" and cross your fingers.
If your page was captured, you'll see a Timeline for each year starting in 1996 with the various dates the web page was captured on.
Try it with http://www.lollapalooza.com. The first page captured was Nov. 6, 1996. That year only had one entry. 1996 was the start up year and for those pages, a lot of images and links don't work, but it's still cool to see how the old html looked. In 2000 the archive captured the pages 15 times, so there are 15 different dates showing! You can see updates before, during and after the tour.

In school, when doing a research report on 9/11, I can go back and see what web sites had on them just days after that event. Web sites I use for study, like Editor and Publisher, don't always have extensive archives with their own site. Now, thanks to the Wayback Machine, much of their material is able to be retrieved!

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the Wayback Machine does not have access to a lot of the old label web site pages, which is a real drag. Likewise, some of the fan pages that were on big university web sites never made it on. If your page doesn't come up, try "Trimming the Branch". Here's how, using an example from a page I use to teach Media Information Gathering at Kent State with:

  1. Click back to the screen where you entered the URL.
  2. Backspace over the last part of the address, for example if the page that couldn't be found was labeled http://www.1079.com/kent/mig/study2.htm, take out the study2.htm . Then re-try the search.
Or, on the initial Wayback page saying it can't find your page, it might offer a link to the top level domain. You could try that.

If you run into problems, or find out something cool others should know, please email me! ear@1079.com
 

last update 06/01/02