If you are a Millennial, you probably don't know places like GeoCities, Hotmail or think that WhatsApp It was the first chat platform. The reason you don't know these names is because no longer exist or belong to other domains.
In the event that you know what these websites were about, a little nostalgia will have awakened in you. While it is no longer possible to use them as before, exists an online application that can show you what they looked like years ago.
With it you will remember the pages where you surely spent hours. You can also snoop what today's most popular sites looked like in the early days. To find out what tool we are talking about, we suggest you read this post.
The Wayback Machine The tool that allows us to travel through time on the Internet!
It is not about the DeLorean, nor will it create a paradox in space and time. However, you can see how the websites you visited the most in the past were seen. It is a tool that works like a digital library of Internet sites. Its database contains copies of a huge number of pages over time.
In this way it is feasible to find a website that has been removed from the server or that it has been modified. Although some addresses may not be available because they avoid being indexed. The service has more than 11,900 terabytes of stored information.
Library has been saving pages since 1996, accumulating millions of gigabytes of data on thousands of servers. An interesting aspect is that backups of these discs have already been created and sent to a library as a historical archive. The system works by saving the HTML content of the source code of the Url registered on the Internet. For this reason, images that have been removed from the original server are not displayed via The Wayback Machine.
Something interesting that happens with this site, is that since its last update you can collaborate with it. We are referring to the possibility of saving a web page for posterity. Entering the address of the same in web.archive.org/save/, in this way the platform will store all the information HTML, plus a screenshot and all linked resources.
Steps to view an old version of a website or a deleted page with The Wayback Machine
This wonderful tool, in addition to being considered a bulwark for web historians, it is very simple to use. Even if the language barrier is inconvenient for you, it is so intuitive that you will not get lost at any time. You can access the site from your computer, mobile or tablet.
You just have to follow these steps:
- Login to web.archive.org.
- In the main search bar put the address you want to investigate.
- Pressing "Enter" the site will return the results ordered on a timeline. And more specifically in a calendar of each year.
- Select the year in the time bar. Each of them will contain black graphs that represent the amount of information that is owned on the site in question. In case of not having any, it means that there is nothing to show.
- Hover over the specific date you are looking for. It must be surrounded by a circle of color, this and its size indicates the amount of catches that are owned on that day. Like over the years, points on the calendar that do not have information will not have this mark.
- Inside the small window that pops up when you move the pointer, the time the site was captured is displayed. Choose from these options.
- The platform It will show you what the portal looked like on the date you entered. In certain cases it is possible to navigate within this interface.
It is important to mention that some URLs do not show all contentAlthough you can always choose another date to explore to the fullest. Too login is disabled through this tool. Well, if we did, we would be modifying a historical document.
Wayback Machine also counts with other utilities like browser extensions and an application for Android and iOS. As for the former, they are Available in Chrome, Firefox and Safari. They offer a much simpler way to save pages and navigate past versions. You can even access deleted files like PDF and images. It is widely used to access deleted posts. For example, tweets or public posts from other social networks.
As to your mobile apps, still not as efficient as extensions and in some cases they present certain errors. However, it offers the same services as the site and can be downloaded for free in the store of each operating system.