Archive.org it is not more than the library of web pages, that is, the site where everything about it is registered and where almost all of them can be found currently existing websites. This means that through this tool you can consult visually the historical state on any platform.
All is stored here the information from the moment of creation of the site, up to the current date, and you can even interact with them in different ways. Without a doubt this tool became one of the best alternatives when wanting to do any kind of historical analysis on an Internet portal, since there you can get practically all the necessary data.
Archive is a completely trustworthy site which is working since 1996, where tracks and stores all necessary web content. Also, it should be mentioned that this belongs to a non-profit organization, which is sponsored by Amazon-owned Alexa company. In accordance with all this, here we are going to teach you how to perform a historical analysis of a websiteTo do this, follow in detail everything that we will teach you below.
What is Archive.org and what is this tool for?
As already mentioned in the previous section, this website carries operating since 1996, Since then he has been in charge of collecting all the necessary web content and has been storing it. The same is a non-profit organization who has also worked hand in hand with companies like Google and NASA, either financially and with the provision of data necessary for its repertoire.
In this way, Archive.org has been developed as an initiative to become a kind of online library but this time from internet websites, so keep cultural works from public domains. All this has led it to become an ideal place to research the entire history of social media and web pages, so you can consult all types of files.
Your main objective is to be able to collect all copies of existing websites in the world, which would make it the main tool that facilitates the study of the evolution of the internet. In the same way, wants preserve web histories, multimedia resources, among other key elements, all this so that visitors can observe in detail what web pages were like in previous decades.
Among some of the elements that will be found on this website you can find what they are files, software, videos, movies, audios and images. Here you can access completely free, as it is a public domain. To make it easier for visitors to use, Archive.org It has different sections that you can visit one by one.
Among some of the most important sections you can find are the following “Moving Images” which is made up of more than 19,000 files, most of them videos, “Prelinger Archives” which contains almost 2,000 files, the section of “Wayback Machine”, among many others. Finally, it can be said that with this tool you will have the opportunity to consult around 40 billion web pages created from 1996 to the present day.
What do you look for when historically analyzing a website?
Surely you are wondering what is achieved when historically analyzing a website, and is that in reality many users spend a large part of their life in power study and learn about the evolution of the Internet, and for this it is necessary to know how they have gone evolving each of the existing websites. Thus, Internet Archive it becomes an extremely important tool for this.
Archive.org not only allows you know old pages, but is currently considered a huge virtual library, it has a 18.5 petabyte storage space, which every time continues to increase, taking into account that daily create millions of new pages plus all the information on the existing ones.
In this way, this project is not only responsible for collecting old pages to bring their history back to the present, but it is also responsible for collecting other types of data such as the following:
- Audio recordings, has around 4.4 million.
- Videos and Views of TV.
- Images.
- Texts and books, There you will find about 16 million books.
- Programs computer scientists.
Therefore, at the time of perform these historical analyzes on a website what is mainly sought is get information on said platform, either to perform a study or research specifically about said portal. In addition, you will be able to know how it has been the evolution of that website from its launch to the present day.
Learn step by step how to analyze a website with Archive.org
Taking into account which is the main objective of this tool, the next thing will be to teach you how analyze a web page contained in the Archive.org library. It is important to mention that this is a very simple process to carry out so you do not need to be a computer expert.
To do this, follow each of the steps that will be taught below:
- To start with this procedure, you need to access “Archive.org” from the bar search your favorite browser. Once you have entered the site, you can start searching and viewing the oldest web pages.
- There are three ways to search for the website you want to analyze, the first of which consists of enter the desired URL in the upper search bar of the portal and then press the key “Enter” to search or click “Go”. This will send you directly to a new page with the results.
- To go back to the main page of the portal you must click on the yellow icon. There you can enter a domain URL or try other functions. To access an archived site you must enter url and click on the option “Browse history”.
- Now enter your search term in the search bar below and choose the option of “Search archived web sites” and click “Go” so that it appears to you the list of domains and web page subscriptions that contain the term you entered for your search.
- Each of the individual entries will show the domain name, the description and the number of captures during a certain period of time, You can also find information about the multimedia content captured from the platform. When you have achieved what you are looking for you must click on “Desired result”.
- You will see a timeline on main page url that you entered for the search. This will be the bottom axis of a diagram where a black column for each of the dates, the height of each of the columns in the bar chart will indicate how often crawlers have scanned the website on that date. In the case that no visible column appears, it means that no record was taken for those dates.
- Now him size of circles show the frequency with which crawlers logged the old version of an internet page back in the day. These are used according to the colors: blue means that a successful tracking on the platform, green he offers you directions, orange, means that a URL has not been found so it will generate the 4xx error and finally the color Red will indicate that there is an error in the server so it will generate a 5xx error.
- The next thing will be to select a day when the old version of the portal has been captured through a capture. This will be just for the days colored, since these will be the ones have such a record. To do this you must click directly on the date to see the screenshot of the page, if it stays mouse over date The different brands will appear on the screen, that is, the time the capture was taken.
- When you are inside the archived website you will be able navigate calmly and as usual in it, for this you must make use of the links. In the case of texts can be easily copied and also save screenshots and page layout.
- In the two options located at the top of the screen as it is “Summary of .. and Site Map of …” offer you the possibility of knowing how many files, images, codes and flash files have found the trackers. In the site map you will be able to see what is the entire domain and a complete section of the web page that you can access with just one click.
