Yesterday I badly needed a pdf file which shows in the Google Search results but is a broken link. The text only version was not good enough (the research paper was figure-heavy). Googling for alternate locations of the pdf did not help. Finally I figured out what i wanted. If there were sites which took snapshots of the web at regular intervals, I could acces a previous edition of the pdf. Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine is exactly that, a time machine for the web. The WayBack Machine lets you “Browse through 85 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago”.
Apart from the need to retrieve a broken link, you can use the wayback machine to do some funstuff. How about checking how the Google homepage looked at 1998? Surprisingly the first archived version of the www.google.com is very simplistic (too simplistic for one’s liking because it just has two links). Another funny page is this one , a collection of the initial Google stickers .
3 posts in 5 days! Not bad! Not bad at all!!
I think. 