Archived pages

Archived pages

The cache pages and links on search engines give the most recent cached version of webpage. However, sometimes you may want to access an even older version of the same webpage for research purposed or just out of curiosity.oif you want to see what a webpage looked like several years ago, then there is a very cool tool called the WAYBACKMACHINE that is available for free at www.archive.org. Since the year 1996, archive.org has been spidering the internet with the intention of creating a permanent digital library of the internet for researches, historians and the general public. This is a fantastic tool that allows you to search for and view an old archived version of popu8lar WebPages on the internet from several months or even years back!

If you are thinking what I am thinking, then you probably realize that not only can this be very useful for research purposes, it can also be used to unblock-web pages that may have been blocked by your local network. Most companies and colleges will not have blocked access to the WAYBACKMACHINE tool and once you website. As simple as that! In the screenshots below, we are going to see how easy it is for you to use the WAYBACKMACHINE tool to view a cached copy of the www.timesofindia.com website from the year 2001.

Step 1:

Start your browser and connect to www.archive.org, type the website URL whose cached or archived copy you wish to view in the space provided and click on the TAKE ME BACK button. For example, www.timesofindia.com 

Step 2:

Select the year,                month and date from which you wish to view the archived copy. In this example, we are going to pretend that we want to see3 the march 5, 2001 coy of www.timesofindia.com website.

Step3:

Within a few seconds, the WAYBACKMACHINE tool will display the archived copy of the www.timesofindia.com

Website from the date that you select in the previous step.

The WAYBACKMACHINE software is very useful to access popular websites that may have been blocked. However, it can’t be used to access blocked websites that may not be that popular or website that have dynamic content. Moreover, whenever you are on the WAYBACKMACHINE website to access an archive copy of a blocked webpage, the blocked domain still appears in the browser URL bar. Most imp0rtantly, this is just one website and can easily be blocked by your network administrator.