Have you ever looked for information on a website to find that it’s not there anymore? Was it ever there? Was it removed? Was it somewhere else? But really, you’re sure that it was there. You’ve seen it there before.
There’s a way to look at old versions of websites. Virtually any website. It’s amazing, and at the same time, a little creepy.
At http://archive.org/web, you can input the url of any website and it will show you a snapshot in time of that website. It may not look 100% perfect and some images may be missing, but it’s going to, most likely, be linked correctly and the text content will be intact.
Having this available comes in handy for all sorts of reasons and at all sorts of odd times. It’s just one of those things that, if nobody tells you — how do you know? You’re welcome!
Here’s some information from the site:
(https://archive.org/about/)
The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, the print disabled, and the general public. Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge.
We began in 1996 by archiving the Internet itself, a medium that was just beginning to grow in use. Like newspapers, the content published on the web was ephemeral – but unlike newspapers, no one was saving it. Today we have 20+ years of web history accessible through the Wayback Machine and we work with 450+ library and other partners through our Archive-It program to identify important web pages.
(https://blog.archive.org/2016/10/23/defining-web-p…)
The Internet Archive has been archiving the web for 20 years and has preserved billions of webpages from millions of websites. These webpages are often made up of, and link to, many images, videos, style sheets, scripts and other web objects. Over the years, the Archive has saved over 510 billion such time-stamped web objects, which we term web captures.