Have you ever wondered what some of your favorite websites might look in the past? Maybe a drastically different interface, or perhaps less quality content than present? Well the Wayback Machine, which can be accessed through web.archive.org,enables you to do just that: peer into the past of websites! Even though it keeps track of some websites better than others over time, it can give you a rough glimpse of how any website might have looked in the past.

By entering the website you want to view, the Wayback Machine will display all dates in which it has kept track of the website. In the picture on the right, we look at www.kompas.com and we can see that the Wayback Machine keeps a very dense record of the history of the website (shown by the green circles on the dates). You can even choose on which year you want to visit, and the graph shows how much activity is tracked by the Wayback Machine in a year. The Wayback Machine will also give suggestions to your search, similar to Google suggestions.

The density of the track record is usually determined by the popularity of the website. Less popular websites may display far fewer green than the example we used above. The machine is very handy in finding out information that is outdated.

This snapshot was taken using the Wayback Machine of www.kompas.com, dated June 18th 2003. The links displayed in the photo are clickable, and they’ll take you to a different page from that time as well!

Written by Charottama Oshmar and Adrian Alexander