HIST 091: Senior Research Seminar (SC)

Some uses for the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

• When you come across a broken link, check for an archived version.

  • Example: Greenpeace blog post from 2008, no longer live on the web

  • Original URL: http://weblog.greenpeace.org/makingwaves/archives/2008/10/coal_gets_the_boot_in_the_gree.html

  • Archived version (crawled on March 18, 2012): https://web.archive.org/web/20120318201527/http://weblog.greenpeace.org/makingwaves/archives/2008/10/coal_gets_the_boot_in_the_gree.html

  • Consider checking multiple versions (if the site has been crawled more than once)
     

• To see what a website looked like at a specific point in time 

  • Example: Philadelphia newspaper Al Dia in 2001

It's easiest to find archived websites when you already have a specific site in mind. Using a different search engine can help you discover relevant sites, both current and older.

• If you usually search using Google, try looking up different terms related to your topic on DuckDuckGo and Bing.
• Sometimes websites change their URLs. Keep an eye out for older URLs for the same site. Then look up those older URLs in the Wayback Machine, you may be able to find earlier screenshots.