Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google Search is starting to integrate links to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
- The Wayback Machine stores cached copies of websites for historical reference, some going back decades.
- The tool’s also useful for when a site’s down, letting you still access its content.
So much of our digital lives is dominated by novelty — what’s new, what’s trending, what’s viral — that it can be easy to lose sight of how important it often is to also have a clear, easily accessible record of the past. And while Google Search can help us find older information, even it only goes so far. For anyone doing serious research online, the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine have been an invaluable resource of past web content, caching pages over the years. Now that powerful tool is coming to Google itself, as Search starts integrating links to the Wayback Machine.
If you’ve never used Wayback before, you’re in for a treat: Just head over to the Wayback Machine, enter the URL you’d like to visit, and you’ll get a list of each time the service crawled the site, scraping and saving its content. Not everything works perfectly — you’ll run into plenty of broken media — but it’s great fun checking out what your favorite sites were up to ten, or even twenty years ago.
According to the Internet Archive, Google will begin featuring links to the Wayback Machine’s cached copies in Search results (via 9to5Google). All you need to do is find the result you’re curious about, hit the three vertical dots next to it to access its “About this Result” card, and navigate to “More About This Page.” There, you’ll now start finding references to historical versions of the page on the Archive.
While that takes a few clicks to get to, it’s still a heck of a lot easier than manually pulling up the Internet Archive every time you want to check for an old version of a page. More than that, it’s a great resource to turn to when a site is temporarily offline — you can still access the most recent Wayback cached copy. In that sense, it’s a partial replacement for Search’s elimination of its own page cache.
We’re still looking for Wayback links to pop up in our own Search results, but the Internet Archive says they should start appearing for users around the world today.
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