Google Search starts offering easy access to old versions of web pages
 

• Google Search is starting to integrate links to the Internet Archives Wayback Machine.
• The Wayback Machine stores cached copies of websites for historical reference, some going back decades.
• The tools also useful for when a sites down, letting you still access its content.

So much of our digital lives is dominated by novelty — whats new, whats trending, whats viral — that it can be easy to lose sight of how important it often is to also have a clear, easily accessible record of the past. And while Google Search can help us find older information, even it only goes so far. For anyone doing serious research online, the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine have been an invaluable resource of past web content, caching pages over the years. Now that powerful tool is coming to Google itself, as Search starts integrating links to the Wayback Machine.

If youve never used Wayback before, youre in for a treat: Just head over to the Wayback Machine, enter the URL youd like to visit, and youll get a list of each time the service crawled the site, scraping and saving its content. Not everything works perfectly — youll run into plenty of broken media — but its great fun checking out what your favorite sites were up to ten, or even twenty years ago.




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