Wayback Machine History and Functionality
– The Wayback Machine began archiving cached web pages in 1996.
– Internet Archive founders Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat launched the Wayback Machine in October 2001.
– The service enables users to see archived versions of web pages across time.
– Kahle and Gilliat created the machine to archive the entire Internet and provide universal access to all knowledge.
– The name Wayback Machine is a reference to a fictional time-traveling device from an animated cartoon.
Wayback Machine Technical Details
– The Wayback Machine’s software crawls the web and downloads publicly accessible information and data files.
– The collected information does not include all available data on the Internet.
– Archive-It.org was developed to allow institutions and content creators to voluntarily harvest and preserve digital content.
– Crawls are contributed from various sources, including third parties and internal sources.
– The Worldwide Web Crawls capture the global web and have been running since 2010.
Wayback Machine Storage Capacity and Growth
– The storage capacity of the Wayback Machine has grown over the years.
– In 2003, the Wayback Machine was growing at a rate of 12 terabytes per month.
– The data is stored on custom-designed PetaBox rack systems.
– As of 2009, the Wayback Machine contained approximately three petabytes of data.
– The Wayback Machine’s storage capacity was increased by 700 terabytes in 2011.
Wayback Machine Access and Features
– Users can access the Wayback Machine by entering a website’s URL into the search box.
– The Wayback Machine began fact-checking content in October 2020.
– Domains of ad servers were disabled from capturing in January 2022.
– The Wayforward Machine was introduced in May 2021, allowing users to travel to the Internet in 2046.
– The Wayback Machine’s interface was updated in 2011, with added features like Changes and Summary.
Wayback Machine Impact and Usage
– The Wayback Machine has archived more than 865 billion web pages.
– It allows users to see how websites looked in the past.
– The Wayback Machine addresses the problem of web content vanishing or websites shutting down.
– The data is stored on the Internet Archive’s large cluster of Linux nodes.
– The Wayback Machine has been used by researchers, scientists, and the general public to access archived web content.
The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit based in San Francisco, California. Created in 1996 and launched to the public in 2001, it allows the user to go "back in time" to see how websites looked in the past. Its founders, Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat, developed the Wayback Machine to provide "universal access to all knowledge" by preserving archived copies of defunct web pages.
 | |
Type of site | Archive |
|---|---|
| Founded |
|
| Area served | Worldwide (except China, Russia, India, and Bahrain) |
| Owner | Internet Archive |
| URL | web |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Optional |
| Current status | Active |
| Written in | HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Java, Python. |
Launched on May 10, 1996, the Wayback Machine had saved more than 38.2 billion web pages at the end of 2009. As of 22 November 2023[update], the Wayback Machine has archived more than 865 billion web pages.
