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Fighting the 404: Where to Look When Information Has Been Deleted

What is the Wayback Machine?

The Wayback Machine, created by Archive.org, contains more than 928 billion websites which have been saved over time. You can think of it as a digital time machine for the Internet that allows you to view websites that no longer exist, or older versions of current websites (e.g., Google.com from 2005). It is a useful tool for recovering pages that have been deleted, so long as you have the URL of the page you would like to see.

How do I use the Wayback Machine?

Visit the Wayback Machine website. In the box that says "Enter a URL..." type in the exact URL of the missing page. To do that, copy and paste the URL from your address bar.

Search box for the Wayback Machine

Below I'm searching for a website that leads to a "Not found" message:

URL typed into the Wayback Machine search engine

Hit the Enter button on your keyboard and you'll see a calendar appear:

You can navigate to a specific year. The days on the calendar that are highlighted with a bubble are days when a backup of the website was captured. A larger bubble means the website was captured multiple times. In other words, the large green bubble on January 29th in the image above means that four snapshots of the website were taken, whereas only one snapshot was taken on February 24th. 

Click the day you would like (oftentimes that would be the most recent capture). If more than one snapshot was taken that day, you can pick the last one by seeing what time it was taken. The format is hour : minute : seconds. A link labeled 12:31:01, for example, was captured at 12:31.

We're now viewing an archived version of the website. If you would like a link to this version, copy and paste the link in your address bar which will be prefaced by https://web.archive.org