How to Browse an Old Version of a Website

This minHour teaches you how to use the Internet Archive's "Wayback Machine" tool to view archived snapshots of Web pages.

Steps

Go to https://web.archive.org in a Web browser.

Enter the URL of the web page you want to browse.

You can also enter keywords to search for a page as well.

Select a year in the timeline.

If an archived snapshot is available, a vertical black bar will appear in the timeline for each time a snapshot of the page was archived.

Scroll down and click on a date highlighted with a blue or green circle.

This will either take you directly to the older version of the website or open a pop-out menu with a list of times.

  • The blue and green circles represent the dates on which the snapshot was archived by the Internet Archive’s Web crawler.

Click on a time in the pop-out menu.

If a pop-out menu appeared, it will list several times that day the website was archived. Select a time to see what the website looked at during that time on the date you specified.

Tips

  • Images and flash content may not be archived, but all text content should still be visible.
  • There is more than websites at Internet Archive. There’s a movie archive with nearly a million digitized movies, live music concerts, sounds and spoken word recordings, and the text of books and magazines—everything from the history of Arpanet and articles about ants to works of science fiction, Federal Court documents, and microfilm records.
  • If you’re looking for a specific page within the old website, the links may still work.

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