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Internet Archive Audio

• This Just In
• Grateful Dead
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• Computers, Technology and Science
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• Radio News Archive

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• CD-ROM Software Library
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• Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

• Wayback Machine (iOS)
• Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

• Explore the Collections
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Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

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Search – A Basic Guide

There are several types of search on archive.org:

• General Metadata Search
• Full-Text Search

Bookreader Text Search

Tv news captions, wayback machine search.

You may also be looking for:

Where is advanced search?

What search apis are available.

• Can I search by Creative Commons license?

How do I sort search results?

How do i search just within a collection, how can i view search results as a list instead of picture tiles, what is indexed in the search engine, what are the lists of metadata on the left side of search results pages, general metadata search:.

This uses the metadata on item pages, like title, creator, description, subjects, etc. It returns results from pages on the site.

Boolean   operators  (AND, OR, AND NOT and ranges using TO) work for this search.

To use this on the site, select  Search metadata  in the drop-down that appears when you type a query in the input text field.

When you enter text into the main search bar on the homepage, you can also choose  Search metadata

Advanced search:

Click on the blue  Advanced Search  below the input text field.

You will be taken to the  Advanced Search  page.

The Advanced Search also uses item metadata on item pages.

It allows you to use the form to create more complex search queries and also to output the results in several formats: JSON, XML HTML, CSV, and RSS URL.

You will find more information and help below the form.

To do an advanced search, click on the following link:

Advanced search 

Full-Text Search (FTS)

This allows you to search inside books and other text items.

It uses the OCRed text file derived from the processing of uploaded text formatted files such as PDF or scanned image zips.

It will search all texts on the site.

To use this on the site, select  Search text contents  in the drop-down that appears when you type a query in the input text field.

This allows you to search the contents of a single item when using the bookreader. The search field is in the upper right in the bookreader.

Enter the search item into the search bar that says  Search Inside.  The system will search inside the book and results will appear as blue icons.

Mouse over the blue icon.

Click on the preferred search result to be taken to the correct place in the book.

This uses the search engine for the TV News Archive.  It searches the closed caption files for captured TV News items.

To use this on the site, select  Search TV news captions  in the drop-down that appears when you type a query in the input text field.

Alternatively, click on the  Video  icon.

Select the TV News category.

Enter your criteria into the search bar.

To search for websites on the Wayback Machine, enter the specific URL of the website into the search bar and select  Search archived websites  in the drop-down.

Alternatively, click on the Web icon on the upper left side of the black bar.

Enter the correct URL into the Wayback Machine search bar.

Select the desired year.

Select the date and the time.

You will be taken to a snapshot of the website.

For more information on using the search on the Wayback Machine visit this link:   Wayback Machine search .

You will find Advanced Search at the bottom of the drop-down or below the search input field.

Information about how to use the various search APIs can be found at  aboutsearch .

Can I search by Creative Commons license?   

Yes, you can. But it’s a little complicated.

1. You need to go and find the license types at the Creative Commons Website. You can do so at the following link  creative commons .

2. Scroll down the page on the Creative Commons Website to find the abbreviations.

3. When you want to find all of the items assigned a certain license by an uploading party, you’ll plug their abbreviation for it into this search query:

licenseurl:http* abbreviation *

So if you’re looking for Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd), you’d put this in the search box:

licenseurl:http* by-nc-nd *

If you want to use this in combination with other queries, like “I want by-nc-nd items about dogs” you’d do this:

licenseurl:http* by-nc-nd *  AND dog

The AND tells the search engine all the items returned should have that license AND they should contain the word dog. AND has to be in all caps.

Just to make it easier, here are the basic searches:

• Public Domain
• Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives  (by-nc-nd)
• Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike  (by-nc-sa)
• Attribution Non-commercial  (by-nc)
• Attribution No Derivatives  (by-nd)
• Attribution Share Alike  (by-sa)
• Attribution  (by)

The  SORT BY  bar has options to allow you to control which results are displayed, in what order and what  view :

On a collection page, there will be a  Search this Collection  input field on the left side of the page.

Enter a term there and hit your return/enter key.

The results will be of items in that collection.

For advanced Boolean search, you can use  AND collection:[IDENTIFIER]  in your query.

For most search results pages, you can choose the view in the  Sort by  bar: Tile view (the icon with three rectangles) or List view (the icon with multiple lines.) Tile view is the default view. Click which view you prefer, and your choice will “stick” as you navigate the site until you switch back to the other view.

Only the metadata in an item page is indexed.

The search engine does not have the text of books, individual file metadata, or embedded metadata.

Those are facets. These are categories of metadata that, when selected, narrow your results.

The number on the right of the type of facet indicates how many results there are for that selection.

You can select multiple facets to narrow down your search.

Clicking  More  will show additional facets to choose from. 

Once you have finished selecting your filters, click  Apply your filters .

How-To Geek

What is the wayback machine, and why is it important.

Liked the old website better? This free tool will let you relive those days.

Quick Links

What is the wayback machine, is the wayback machine legal, the importance of the wayback machine.

The Wayback Machine lets you view older versions of a website , see content that's changed, troubleshoot your own site, and even view content that no longer "exists" on the web. The Wayback Machine is important for preserving Internet history.

Founded by the Internet Archive on May 12, 1996, the Wayback Machine is a free online service that crawls and takes snapshots of websites at different time intervals and then archives those sites, preserving the Internet's history. The Wayback Machine was named after the Wayback Machine from The Rocky and Bullwinkle's Show's "Peabody's Improbable History."

Even though the Wayback Machine was founded in 1996, it was completely privatized and only certain people had access to the content. It wasn't until 2001 that the Wayback Machine was available to the public. At the time of writing, the Wayback Machine has archived over 663 billion web pages.

There's a lot of gray area when it comes to the legality of the Wayback Machine. As an example, Europe may view the Wayback Machine as a violation of its copyright laws, and the creators of the archived content can decide if they want their content to be archived or not. If a creator wants to have their content removed from the Wayback Machine, then Internet Archive must oblige.

Related: What Is a Web Crawler, and How Does It Work?

There have also been several legal cases against the Wayback Machine from organizations and individuals, such as the Church of Scientology, Healthcare Advocates, Inc., and others.

Some countries have even banned the Wayback Machine completely, though that's more based on censorship than any actual legal issue. The Wayback Machine is currently blocked in China and was blocked for a short time in Russia in 2015-2016.

The importance of the Wayback Machine is apparent. Preserving the history of the Internet is important enough, but you're also able to go back and view an original source of content to see what it was like before updates to the content were made. This can be especially useful in an age of constantly-changing information.

You can even use the Wayback Machine to troubleshoot problems with your website. Forbes even provides a sound argument for using it to troubleshoot SEO issues your site may be facing. You can even recover entire websites . Wikipedia, thanks to many bots and dedicated volunteers, was able to replace 9 million broken references thanks to the Wayback Machine.

Additionally, if a website is currently down, you can use the Wayback Machine to view the website . While there won't be any new content on the site until the site owners fix the issue, you can still view older content.

Related: How to Access a Web Page When It's Down

Another cool use of the Wayback Machine is the ability to see websites that are no longer online. There are some shortcomings here, though. The Wayback Machine takes a snapshot of how a website looks at a certain time on a certain date. Depending on when the Wayback Machine took the snapshot, some of the content may be missing.

There's also the issue of content hiding behind a sign-in wall. One instance I personally give is PlayOnline.com. Final Fantasy IX is a fantastic game. However, the BradyGames strategy guide is famously known as the worst strategy guide in existence . The reason is that it was largely an incomplete guide. In almost every section, in an attempt to drive more users to their website, they would add a side note stating something along the lines of "For more information on how to beat this boss, visit PlayOnline.com and enter this code: BS103."

This, of course, was a problem for many players who bought the guide, as the Internet wasn't as easily accessible to as many people in 2000 as it is today. To make matters worse? The portion of the website doesn't even exist today. If you bought the strategy guide years ago, you're out of luck. So, I tried to access it through the Wayback Machine.

Unfortunately, you had to have an account to log in to PlayOnline. Somehow I was still able to create an actual account, but it just sent me in an infinite sign-in loop. I wasn't actually able to ever log in and access the content.

Regardless of the few shortcomings, the benefits of the Wayback Machine are tremendous and will always prove to be one of the most useful resources for preserving Internet history.

Related: How to Browse Old Versions of Websites

7 Wayback Machine Alternative (Internet Archive Website)

Here is a curated list of Top applications that are capable of replacing Wayback Machine. The list contains both open source(free) and commercial(paid) software.

Best Web Archive Sites (Time Machine Website)

1) fluxguard.

Fluxguard provides precision website archiving. It crawls any site — including those that require complex interaction—any creates a complete baseline, and versioned changes.

✓ Fluxguard Uses GPT-4 to Filter and Summarize Web Changes

✓ Precision Change Detection

✓ Automate Web Change Audits

✓ Alert Critical Web Changes

• Comprehensive Crawling: Fluxguard crawls any website, regardless of its complexity. It can handle interactive elements such as drop-down menus, forms, and authentication.
• Versioning: Fluxguard captures detailed versioning of all changes that occur to a website and stores them for future reference.
• Secure Storage: Fluxguard stores archives securely in the cloud, so that they are always accessible and protected from data loss.
• Automatic Updates: Fluxguard can be configured to automatically capture changes to websites on a regular basis.
• Reporting: Fluxguard provides detailed reports on website changes, so that you can easily track trends and spot anomalies.

Visit Fluxguard >>

Stillio is a tool that automatically captures website snapshots, archives and shares to other users. You can manage your website history and save lots of time.

✓ Automated Archiving

✓ Stillio captures website ads

✓ Share a screenshot with anyone in one click

✓ Easily capture responsive websites across multiple devices

• You can set screenshot frequencies according to your customized duration.
• You can add multiple URL at once.
• You can save the screenshot to Dropbox.
• It supports URL sharing.
• It is one of the best Web Archive Sites which enables you to filter URLs by domain.
• You can use custom titles to keep everything organized.
• Stillio website time machine helps you to take a screenshot from the website geographic location by identifying it’s IP address.
• You can hide unwanted elements like overlays, banners, or cookie popups.

Visit Stillio >>

3) Archive.fo

Archive.fo is online tool that helps you to create a copy of the webpage. This copy will remain online, even if the original page is removed.

• This application saves a text and a graphical copy of the page for better accuracy.
• It is one of the best Wayback Machine alternatives that gives a short link to an unalterable record of any web page.
• This tool allows you to track changes of the website containing job offer, price list, blog post, real estate listing, and so on.
• Saved pages do not contain any malware or popups.

Link: https://archive.fo/

4) Perma.cc

Perma.cc is a web archiving app developed and maintained by the Harvard Law School Library. It helps you to create permanent records of the websites.

• You can delete links within 24 hours after creation.
• It helps you to view archived records through Perma.cc link
• URLs can be inserted via blog or paper articles.
• This Wayback Machine alternative enables you to create Parma that visits the website and create a record of the content of that website.
• If the preservation fails, this app will give you options to upload PDF file or image.
• Individuals can get access to permalinks via tiered subscriptions.
• You can assign users to any organization by simply submitting the user’s email address into this cloud-based program.

Link: https://perma.cc

5) Actiance

Actiance app help organizations to capture and archive electronic communications. It is one of the sites like Wayback Machine which supports more than 80 channels.

• Capture all relevant communications.
• You can identify and manage risk and extract the business value of your data.
• It allows you to produce, package, and deliver content on-demand.
• This cloud-based website history checker app provides an analytics dashboard for better visualization of data.
• It is one of the best archive website that includes advanced as well as proximity search across all channels.
• It offers comprehensive and customizable reporting for archived websites.

Link: https://www.smarsh.com

6) UK Web Archive

UK Web Archive collects details of numerous sites each year and preserves for the future. It is one of the best Web Archive Sites that focuses on subject, event or areas of interest, and social media to archive.

• You can use this website to search for UK web archives.
• It allows you to discover the website on various themes and topics.
• This internet history machine app collects images, videos, html pages, pdf, etc.
• It is one of the best Internet archive sites that performs automated collection of range of UK website in one year.

Link: https://data.webarchive.org.uk/opendata/

7) Memento Time Travel

Memento time travel helps you to search and view versions of webpages that existed in the past. It is one of the best website archive sites that supports finding Mementos in web archives.

• It checks the whole range of servers to search web pages.
• This internet history archive website displays web page components based on the time requested by you.
• It self-archives web server content.
• It focusses on various components like HTML, style sheets, and images, etc.
• You can see the distribution of archival DateTime using the timeline.
• This Internet time machine website provides a bar chart showing checked and missing components of archived web pages.

Link: http://timetravel.mementoweb.org/

Wayback Machine is a service that archives information available on the WWW (World Wide Web) . It allows users to see how the websites used to look in the past. Many researchers and historians widely use it to preserve digital artifacts. However, Wayback Machine has some limitations, like it is very slow and unresponsive on many crawlable websites.

Following are some of the best sites like Wayback machine:

• archive.today
• UK Web Archive
• Memento Time Travel

You can follow the below steps to use Wayback Machine to view the website archive:

• Step 1) Open this link in your web browser
• Step 2) Enter the site URL you want to save in the “Enter a URL or words related to a site’s home page” field
• Step 3) Press the “Enter” button
• Step 4) Select the year on the bar graph
• Step 5) Select the date
• Step 6) Browse various archived versions of the site
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Wayback Machine: 5 Alternatives To Try

Discover alternatives to the Wayback Machine for preserving website history and data. Explore web archives and their unique features for SEO.

The internet is constantly changing, with websites appearing and disappearing and information being added or removed constantly.

This makes it hard for people who study and analyze the internet or businesses to control their online appearance. It’s easy for things to get lost or vanish entirely.

But there’s good news! There are web archives, like the Wayback Machine, that take “snapshots” of websites at different times. This means they save a copy of the website’s appearance on a specific date.

In this article, we’ll look closer at the Wayback Machine and other web archives. We’ll talk about what makes them unique and how they can be used for different things, including SEO .

What Is The Wayback Machine?

The Wayback Machine is like a big online library that saves copies of websites from different times.

It’s run by the Internet Archive, and it doesn’t make any money from it. With the Wayback Machine, you can see what a website looked like in the past, even if it’s changed or gone offline now.

To use it, you type in the website address you want to look up, and it’ll show you a calendar with all the dates when it saved a copy of that site. Click on a date, and you’ll see the website exactly as it was on that day.

The Wayback Machine is excellent and has saved over 800 billion webpages, but it might not have every page or update ever made to a site.

That’s where other web archives come in handy, as they might have saved some stuff that the Wayback Machine missed.

Alternative Web Archives And Their Use Cases

1. the memento project.

Memento is an exceptional alternative to the Wayback Machine because it aggregates several sources, including the Wayback Machine itself.

You can access archives from several sources on the website using the Time Travel tool.

This is the first distinction that makes Memento so cool. It also includes some of the other archives on this list. That means it’s a customizable experience and likely one of the most complete.

Memento’s other distinct feature is the Chrome extension, which allows you to select the date on which you’d like to view your current page. This brings the tool to where you’re browsing instead of forcing you to enter a URL into a form.

You can also create a snapshot of a page and generate a link that will not break. This is particularly useful for citations.

If you’re concerned a page might disappear or the content might get updated, but you want to use the information, creating one of these links ensures that people can see your source.

• Researchers can use Memento to access a broader range of archived content from various sources, increasing the likelihood of finding relevant information .
• Intellectual property attorneys can use Memento to gather evidence of prior art or trademark infringement by accessing archived versions of websites.
• Marketers can track the evolution of competitors’ websites and marketing strategies over time, identifying trends and shifts in messaging.

2. Archive.today

Archive.today is another “snapshot” tool. It allows you to save a link to a page as it currently exists.

It offers a simple way to preserve content and generate unalterable links to the archived versions.

Following the link will send users to an unalterable version of the page.

It also features some relatively advanced search queries you can perform on domains and URLs to find snapshots that have been saved with the tool.

This tool also features a Chrome extension and an Android app.

Searches on Memento can include results from Archive.today.

• Journalists can use Archive.today to save snapshots of online articles or social media posts, preserving evidence of important statements or events.
• Researchers can create permanent links to archived pages, ensuring that their sources remain accessible and unaltered over time.
• The Archive.today Chrome extension and Android app make it easy to quickly save snapshots of pages while browsing or on the go.

WebCite has powerful applications for authors, journalists, academics, and publishers.

It offers a variety of ways to build and present the archived pages and the URLs.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to be taking new requests at the time of publishing. But you can still access already archived pages. When and if it starts accepting requests again, it’s a handy tool.

Its most powerful feature for authors and publishers is the ability to upload a manuscript directly to the website.

The tool will scan every link in an uploaded manuscript and automatically create archives of each of the pages linked to as they currently exist. This saves a lot of time if you’ve used many website citations.

If you’ve created content that you want people to be able to create snapshots of, then you can add a specific WebCite link to your page that users can click on. This embeds archive functionality into your page, saving users time if they use your work as a citation.

• Authors and publishers can upload manuscripts directly to WebCite, which will automatically create archives of all the linked pages in their current state, saving time and ensuring that citations remain valid.
• Content creators can add WebCite links to their pages, allowing readers to easily create snapshots of the content for future reference or citation.
• Medical researchers can use WebCite to create permanent links to online supplementary materials for their published papers, ensuring that the resources remain accessible to readers.
• Legal professionals can archive web-based evidence using WebCite, guaranteeing that the content remains unaltered and admissible in court proceedings.

GitHub is a development and collaboration platform prioritizing public projects and open-source code.

It documents and archives open-source code and programs and is searchable by other archives, such as the Wayback Machine.

But, if you’re looking for something related to code or software development, it might be easier to go straight to GitHub instead of another archive service.

While it does have paid business plans, GitHub is free for the average user. It even offers 15 GB of storage and some computing power in its cloud developer environment for free for your personal use.

• Developers can use GitHub to access older versions of open-source projects, study their evolution, and learn from the code.
• Cybersecurity experts can study the commit history of open-source projects on GitHub to identify vulnerabilities and track the evolution of security patches.
• Researchers can explore the development history of software projects, analyze coding patterns, and investigate the impact of open-source software on various industries.

5. Country-Specific Web Archives

Several countries run their web archives.

These can be particularly helpful alternatives to the Wayback Machine if you’re looking for a website highly relevant to a specific location or country’s culture.

More focused archives might have more complete information if you’re having trouble finding it elsewhere. However, again, I want to mention that the first alternative in this list, Memento, pulls from several different country-specific archives.

I should also note that many archives specific to a country, region, educational institution, or individual library are partnered with Archive-it , a service provider built by The Internet Archive (makers of the Wayback Machine).

It curates specific collections based on relevance, but all Archive-it partners leverage the same source: The Internet Archive.

These are a few of the country-specific web archives:

• The UK Web Archive .
• The Library of Congress Web Archive .
• Web Archive Singapore .
• The Croatian Web Archive .
• Researchers studying a specific country’s history, culture, or politics can access archived web content that might not be available elsewhere.
• Businesses looking to understand the online landscape of a particular country can use these archives to gather competitive intelligence and track the evolution of local websites.
• Anthropologists and sociologists can use country-specific web archives to study the evolution of online culture and social norms in different regions.
• Economists can analyze archived web data from specific countries to track changes in consumer behavior , online marketplaces, and digital economies over time.

How The Wayback Machine Can Be Useful For SEO

In addition to its value for research and analysis, the Wayback Machine can also be a powerful tool for SEO professionals.

Here are some ways it can be used to improve a website’s search engine performance:

1. Recover Lost Or Broken Links

If a website undergoes a redesign or migration, some pages may be removed, or URLs may change, resulting in broken links and lost link equity.

The Wayback Machine can help identify these lost pages and provide opportunities to redirect them to relevant, existing content, preserving link equity and improving user experience .

2. Perform Competitive Analysis

Exploring archived versions of competitors’ websites can help SEO professionals gain insights into historical strategies, content changes, and keyword targeting .

This information can help inform their SEO strategies and identify opportunities for improvement.

3. Identify Backlink Opportunities

The Wayback Machine can reveal old backlinks to a website that may have been lost due to content updates or URL changes.

SEO professionals can potentially recover valuable link equity by discovering these lost backlinks and contacting the linking websites.

4. Monitor SERP Changes

By archiving search engine results pages (SERPs) over time, SEO professionals can track changes in rankings, featured snippets , and SERP features for their target keywords.

This data can help them understand the impact of algorithm updates and adjust their strategies accordingly.

5. Prove Ownership and Prevent Plagiarism

When a website’s content is plagiarized or used without permission, the Wayback Machine can provide evidence of the original content’s existence and ownership, which can be useful in legal disputes or DMCA takedown requests.

6. Identify Content Gaps

By analyzing competitors’ archived websites, SEO professionals can identify gaps and opportunities for creating unique, valuable content targeting untapped keywords or topics.

7. Track Algorithm Updates

SEO professionals can use the Wayback Machine to archive their websites and monitor changes in rankings and traffic following major search engine algorithm updates, helping them diagnose and address any issues.

8. Recover Deleted Content

Suppose valuable content is accidentally deleted from a website. In that case, SEO professionals can use the Wayback Machine to retrieve and restore lost content, minimizing the impact on search rankings and user experience.

9. Identify Historical Trends

By studying archived versions of top-ranking websites in their industry, SEO professionals can identify historical trends in content length, formatting, and keyword usage, which can inform their content optimization strategies .

10. Audit Historical SEO Practices

The Wayback Machine can help SEO professionals audit a website’s historical SEO practices, such as identifying past keyword stuffing, cloaking, or other black-hat techniques that may have resulted in manual penalties or ranking drops.

The Importance Of Web Archives: A Summary

Web archives, like the Wayback Machine and similar tools, are handy for saving internet snapshots as they change over time.

They can be helpful for researchers, journalists, marketers, and SEO professionals who want to study, analyze, or improve things online.

When using web archives, remember that they try their best to save as much of the internet as possible, but they might have yet to capture every webpage or update.

Also, each archive has its unique features and focus, so think about what you need before choosing which one to use.

Web archives are great for finding removed content, seeing how things have changed, or gathering proof for legal situations.

By getting to know these tools and what they can do, you can uncover valuable information and opportunities that could otherwise be lost forever in the constantly changing online world.

More resources:

• Try These Tools & Methods For Exporting Google Search Results To Excel
• 23 Great Search Engines You Can Use Instead of Google
• How Search Engines Work

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SEO content writer and editor for 6+ years. Formerly a live theater professional. Bumbling through fatherhood. I’m fascinated by how ...

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Search the web cache to view archived pages of any website.

What is archivedweb.

ArchivedWeb is a tool developed as a part of a university project to make archived websites or specific offline pages accessible again. Websites can become unavailable for a large number of reasons. Sometimes content is being relocated, websites are updated and redesigned or the owner simply stops running the website.

With the growing use of the internet and evolving technologies, it is now possible to find copies of pages which are no longer available online. Search engines often save these pages to make them available offline. Saved copies are also available spaced over the lifespan of the website on the Wayback Machine.

ArchivedWeb remains a free to use tool to search the cache of offline websites. If use ArchivedWeb to search for articles or publications for university work, please read our article “ How to cite a cached website APA style “.

Search Google’s Cache

Our foremost recommended option is to search Google’s cache. Google is the largest search engine in the world and keeps a highly up to date database with cached websites. Google offers additional information to inform you when the page was saved and lets you easily search the page (use Crtl + F) for terms you might be looking to find.

Wayback Machine Cache

Secondly ArchivedWeb selected the Wayback Machine, operated by Archive.org, as an alternative option to Google. The Wayback Machine offers a larger database than Google, but doesn’t update as regularly. It also offers all pages it ever captured and stored in its cache, so with the Wayback Machine you can go back in history and find much older pages and web designs. It also allows you to largely browse older versions of websites.

Other cache search engines

Currently, only Google and the Wayback Machine are available. In the future we will expand our search options to all major search engines which offer a cache database.

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How to Archive a Website: Our Mammoth Guide to Saving Your Site

Maintaining your website involves having a dedicated backup strategy . While backups are essential, they’re not the only way to preserve your site. The natural extension to backup is to archive a website—though they’re complementary processes.

There are several flexible ways to archive a website. The great news is that they’re all user-friendly and accessible. You merely have to pick the right solution for your needs and requirements.

In this post, we’ll take a look at how to archive a website. We’ll also explore different archiving types you’ll come across, round up a few of the most prominent site archiving tools, and discuss some tips for archiving your site.

Prefer to watch the video version ?

An introduction to website archiving.

Archiving a website means preserving the content, data, and media for future reference. Using a dedicated service such as the Wayback Machine (though we’ll get onto other solutions later), you can view older versions of a website.

On a technical level , crawlers take snapshots of a website, which constitutes the archive itself. You’re able to access it using a simple calendar and view each iteration in a timeline format if you wish.

As for why solutions such as the Wayback Machine exist, we have to go back to the early 2000s. The dot-com bubble was all but burst; many businesses were going down. Some popular websites were shut down or abandoned, with few memories left behind.

Much like other media formats before the internet, such as music and television, these websites held historical and nostalgic value. To save them meant to give future internet users a glimpse at how far we’d come from earlier technology.

The Internet Archive launched the Wayback Machine to help preserve websites. If a site has been archived on there, you can see how a site has evolved over the years.

Many crawlers are required for archiving a website, including huge individual crawls that could take years to complete. The grunt needed to carry out crawling “expeditions” and store the resultant snapshots is immense.

For example, Wayback Machine’s first 100 Terabyte (TB) server became operational in 2004. By the end of 2020, Wayback Machine had stored over 70 Petabytes (PB) of data . That’s over 70,000 Terabytes.

However, not everyone is comfortable with the work the Internet Archive is doing. There have been several discussions and legal challenges based on whether an archive of a website breaks existing copyright issues.

Still, given the considerable growth in the number of archives stored, there’s a clear desire to preserve websites.

Why You’d Want to Archive a Website

There are plenty of reasons for wanting to archive a website, other than simply for nostalgic reasons. For a real-world analogy, look at GitHub .

Github stores repositories of a project, along with every “commit” made. To compare this to internet archiving, the repositories represent the whole archive, and the commits are the snapshots.

In the same way that Git repositories are valuable, so is an archive. For example, you can look at previous iterations of your site—even from many years ago—to influence your current design choices.

Also, you may be legally obligated to archive your site, especially if you’re in the financial or legal industries.

Finally, if you’re unfortunate enough to be involved in litigation surrounding your site, your archives will be valuable evidence. If you can present clear and complete site archives, you can throw off disputes even before the courts get involved.

The Difference Between Backups and Archiving

Before we talk about the different types of web archiving available, it’s worth coming back to a topic we touched on earlier. On paper, a site backup and website archive appear similar. However, they perform different jobs that complement each other. In a nutshell:

• Backups are data-based. They’re more concerned with preserving the data of your site. Given that backups are vital if you need to restore your site , having a complete backup of your data is paramount.
• Archives preserve context over data. If you trawl through your favorite website’s archive , you’ll notice that the functionality is often patchy. However, the site’s design and static content are usually intact.

It’s worth noting that archiving doesn’t look to eschew data preservation efforts altogether. Indeed, one of the benefits is letting users navigate your site as if it were live. Even so, given that sites such as the Wayback Machine exist as a virtual “memory lane,” keeping the visuals intact takes higher priority than preserving backend functionality.

In short, you’ll want to use both backups and archives for your site—the former as daily protection in case the worst happens, and the latter as an additional way to help document the evolution of your site.

The Different Types of Web Archiving You’ll Encounter

Web archiving doesn’t just come in one flavor. There are a few different types you’ll come across. Here’s a breakdown of each:

• Client-side: It involves the end-user saving a version of the website in question. It’s simple, scalable, and lets you archive a website with no fuss.
• Server-side: The approach of the Wayback Machine and others is classed as server-side archiving. It uses crawlers and other technology to archive a website, but it also requires a level of consent not found in client-side archiving.
• Transaction-based: While this is still based on server-side archiving, it’s more complex and requires explicit consent from the site owner. Essentially, it archives the site transactions between the end-user and server.

For simple websites with static data , coupled with an organized archiving strategy, client-side archiving should fit the bill. However, most other sites will favor server-side archives—transaction-based archiving isn’t necessary for most websites.

Finally—and we’ll discuss this in more detail throughout the post—you’ll also want to consider where and how your archives are stored . For example, a local archive isn’t a poor choice, but you could see it disappear if you have a computer failure. On the flip side, you have less control over what’s archived if you opt for a third-party solution.

As you’d expect, the answer here is to use a multi-faceted approach to archive a website. We suggest treating archives like backups: keep three different copies in separate locations and synced somehow.

You may want to make one of the archives live, too, so that you can take advantage of any server-side functionality on your site. The result is a website with a robust backup and archive strategy that remains useful to others.

A Beginners’ Guide to Internet Archive Tools and Sites

There are a plethora of solutions available to archive a website. We’ll run down a few of the more popular ones, along with our opinion on how it might suit you.

1. Wayback Machine

First off, let’s discuss the Wayback Machine . It was the first of its kind, so it set the benchmark for other archiving tools.

As such, it’s likely going to be the first place head when looking to archive a website. It has many ways to create and upload archives, and even a dedicated API to hook into its functionality. It’s worth noting it’s a server-side archive solution too.

That said, due to how it crawls and archives websites, the Wayback Machine might not be able to preserve all of your site’s functionality. Nevertheless, it’s considered the industry standard for web archivists, and it’s entirely free to boot. We’ll show you how to archive a website in more detail using the Wayback Machine later in this article.

2. Archive.today

Next up is Archive.today . It’s similar in many ways to the Wayback Machine—even down to the site’s almost “retro” design. Its data servers are based in Europe, but it approaches archiving differently than the Wayback Machine.

For starters, Archive.today isn’t based on crawlers running over the web. Instead, you submit your URLs and consent to inclusion in the archive. Besides, its feature list is more bare-bones than other solutions. There isn’t a robust deletion policy, for example, and the archiving process excludes certain media and file types.

Still, it’s free and suitable if you want a complimentary place to store archives. The site even has search functionality to find previously archived sites.

3. Heritrix

We’ve mentioned the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine almost interchangeably in this post so far. The Wayback Machine is just one service, though, and the Internet Archive offers a few other archiving products aside from it. Heritrix is a free, open-source tool born from a collaboration between the Internet Archive and Nordic libraries.

It’s essentially a web crawler rather than a full-featured archiving tool. However, you can package all the crawled results together. While this hasn’t been the case in the past, the Wayback Machine now uses Heritrix to crawl sites for inclusion on its own site. What’s more, a large number of libraries and institutions use Heritrix to build archives.

Despite its impressive features, installing Heritrix requires some technical know-how. There isn’t a user-friendly interface to install it for you, so you’ll need knowledge of Git, GitHub, and the command line .

As with other similar solutions, Heritrix is entirely free to use, so it’s suitable as a cost-effective self-archiving solution.

4. Web Archiving Integration Layer (WAIL)

If you’re looking at Heritrix to archive a website, but are put off by the technical knowledge required to simply install the software, there’s a potential solution for you. The Web Archiving Integration Layer (WAIL) is a free and open-source cross-platform desktop app that gives you a functional Graphical User Interface (GUI) to use, along with an installer.

The good news is that Heritrix is WAIL’s crawling engine. It means you get to leverage the power of Heritrix while not having to traverse GitHub and the command line. Besides, WAIL uses the OpenWayback engine to “replay” web archives.

As such, you have a full-featured web archiving tool ready to go on your machine. We’ll also show you exactly how WAIL works later on in the article.

Our penultimate archiving tool is billed as an automated solution that takes snapshots at set intervals. Stillio is a premium service that looks and feels different from other archiving solutions.

The website looks slick and gives you myriad options to create an archive that meets your exact requirements. For example, you’re able to add tags and custom titles to your URLs.

What’s more, you can choose to store archives to Dropbox , Google Drive , and other third-party services .

However, Stillio has one huge drawback: it doesn’t support back-end archiving. You’re restricted to screenshots of your website rather than a full archive of data. For many applications, this isn’t enough.

However, Stillio could be useful in some cases, such as serving as a brand management and tracking tool. For example, you can take screenshots of competitor sites or search engine results. It’s also great for content verification.

Stillio’s pricing starts at $29 per month and rises through four tiers up to $299 per month. It’s a big ask, especially when there are free alternatives with more powerful features. But if it fits your use case perfectly, then it’s worth taking a look!

6. Pagefreezer

Our final solution is another automated tool. Pagefreezer offers many of the same benefits as Stillio, but it also archives social media content, text messages, full sites, and enterprise-level collaboration platforms .

On the surface, Pagefreezer seems like a more robust solution than Stillio and would have greater value in various use cases.

For example, where you’re legally required to archive a site fully, Pagefreezer fits the bill. It allows you to automate the number of snapshots and review them using a site archive browser and comparison tool.

Overall, Pagefreezer is a great, enterprise-level solution for workplace archiving. Companies that use Yammer or Salesforce’s Chatter will gravitate to this type of solution, as will Workplace users .

What Is the Web Archive (WARC) File Format?

If you’re researching how to archive a website, you’ll come across the Web Archive (WARC) format. It’s a packaged combo of your site archive’s various files so that it’s portable and self-contained.

The Internet Archive created WARC to preserve web data on a long-term basis. The International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) has published the full specification of the file format. It will store images , metadata , and practically everything your site needs to run on a standalone basis.

While it was originally just a handy file format, WARC is now an international ISO standard for digital archives. As such, it’s been adopted by governments and other official bodies. In fact, there are several use cases where a WARC file is vital:

• E-discovery : It’s the process during litigation where digital records are researched and presented for inclusion in a trial. For social media records, a WARC file meets the E-discovery legal standard.
• Freedom of Information (FOI):  There are many governments and official bodies that use the FOI and Open Records acts to offer a “Right to Know” (RTK) service to state constituents. The WARC format is ideal in cases involving digital records.

WARC is used by many different archiving solutions and crawlers, such as StormCrawler and Apache Nutch . You can also tweak the settings of a command-line tool such as Wget to fetch and package requests as WARC files. We’ll discuss this in more detail shortly.

There are plenty of other tools that can output to WARC files too. For example, the open source web pages saving tool wallabag can do this.

As an alternative, grab-site is a web-based app to help with crawling archives as WARC files.

Opening a WARC file depends on the tool you’re using. Regardless of the solution you prefer, bear in mind that some of these tools haven’t been updated in a while.

As such, you’ll want to make sure your chosen solution works with your current system and that it’s going to be available to use in the future. You’ll be saving yourself plenty of headaches if you avoid a tool that could wind up discontinued or abandoned while you’re in the middle of an archiving project.

Tips for Managing Your Offline Archives

Before we get into how to archive a website, let’s take a few minutes to help you organize your existing archives. We’ve touched on the subject, but having a solid approach in place will make your archives more manageable. Your site’s users will also get greater use out of a well-organized archive.

There are three key elements you have to keep in mind:

• Frequency:  Decide how often you want to archive a site. Huge, dynamic, complex sites with almost daily changes will need more frequent snapshots than static sites.
• Location: Just like backups, you should save archives in several different places, including the cloud. Follow the 3-2-1 rule for extra assurance. We’d also suggest more than this if you want to capture the full depth of your site.
• Structure: Like your computer’s directories, you should look to use explicit folders, subdivided into the site archives’ names and the date a specific site was archived.

While you could expand your archive administration further, these three tips will start your archiving off on the right foot.

5 Ways to Archive a Website

Below, we’re going to suggest five different ways to archive a website. We’ve ordered the solutions based on their relative difficulty. However, if you spot a solution you think will work for your current needs, feel free to dive in and find more.

1. Save a Single Page to Your Local Computer

First off, let’s discuss the most straightforward solution. It’s great if you need to archive a single page, and even better, the functionality is already in practically every browser.

To start, open your favorite browser and head to the website you’d like to archive. Once the page has loaded, navigate to your browser’s File menu and find the Save Page As option:

Next, click the option to save the page, at which point the browser will show you a dialog box.

Here, choose a name for your page (though the default is fine). Also, make sure that you’re saving the entire page rather than just the HTML . It will preserve the site with the most functionality possible.

2. Use DevKinsta to Archive Your WordPress Website

We think DevKinsta is an essential tool for creating and deploying WordPress websites. However, it also has another string in its bow: it helps you archive your Kinsta-hosted websites too.

We’ve covered the entire process of pulling an external MyKinsta backup into DevKinsta in one of our knowledgebase articles. To summarize:

• Create and download a backup in MyKinsta.
• Create a new site with DevKinsta.
• Import your content and database .
• Carry out a search-and-replace on your database to change the URL name from your live site to your new local archive.

At this point, you can open your site in DevKinsta and use it as though it were live.

3. Use an Online Archive (Such As the Wayback Machine)

No tutorial would be complete without showing you how the Wayback Machine works. Fortunately, the process is simple. That said, note that this method only lets you archive individual pages (though the subscription Archive-It service does let you archive full sites).

For this approach, head to the Wayback Machine home page and check out the Save Page Now form:

To archive a page, simply add the URL you wish to save to this form, then click Save Page . Depending on how large or complex the page is, you may need to wait a few minutes while the crawler and engine do their thing. It could be that the page looks as though it’s crashed. We were faced with a White Screen of Death (WSoD) for a while in our testing.

However, once the page has been archived, Wayback Machine will redirect you to the new, dedicated page.

Note that you can also use a bookmarklet and browser extension to archive a website too. In fact, most of the current browsers have these options out of the box, including Google Chrome , Firefox , and Safari .

4. Install the Web Archiving Integration Layer (WAIL)

Your first step with this approach is to download WAIL itself and install it. Fortunately, there’s a dedicated installer for the tool (though because the program is written in Python , it uses the PyInstaller module).

The install process is a breeze. Regardless of your operating system (OS), you can carry out the following:

• Navigate to the WAIL website and download the appropriate installer for your OS.
• Either unzip the file for the Windows version, or mount the DMG image for macOS.
• On the resultant dialog screen for macOS, drag the app icon to your Applications folder. For Windows users, simply drag the unzipped folder to your root C:\ drive.
• Launch either WAIL.app or WAIL.exe (depending on your OS).

Once WAIL is open, you’ll see its minimal interface:

You are now presented with three options to choose from: view an archive, check its status, or archive a website. The buttons are slightly confusing, as your natural inclination may be to read from left to right. However, on the first launch, you’ll have nothing in your archives.

Instead, enter the URL for the site you want to archive, and click Archive Now! You’ll see WAIL begin to crawl the website. You can check on the status of your crawl on the Advanced > Heritrix tab:

When it’s done, it’ll show you a “Success” message. At this point, you can click the View Archive button on the Basic tab. This will open your archived site in a browser, ready for you to view.

5. Use Wget If You’re Comfortable Using the Command Line

For our final method to archive a website, you’ll need a few things before you start:

• Command line access to your computer
• A suitable command line tool such as Windows Command Prompt, or Terminal on macOS and Linux
• Wget installed on your computer

You’ll likely have the first two already.

On macOS, you can install Wget through Homebrew with the brew install wget command. Note that you also need to install Homebrew, but it only takes seconds. On Linux, Wget is pre-installed on most of the major distros.

If you’re a Windows user, you may have a tougher time installing Wget on your computer. While there are tutorials available across the web, their guidance doesn’t appear consistent between machines. Instead, we recommend you head to the official Wget website and check out some of the available Windows binaries , as these are more likely to work for you.

Regardless, once you’ve installed Wget, using it is straightforward. First, navigate to a directory in a new terminal window. Here, we’re creating the directory too, but this step is optional:

cd documents && mkdir archive && cd archive

Note that Wget will pull all downloads into whatever the working directory is. In this case, we’ve specified a folder for our files.

Next, you’ll want to crawl a site and pull the files. Every action is invoked using the wget command, and you’ll want to use the following format:

wget "https://kinsta.com/" --warc-file="kins"

Hitting the Enter key will begin the download of kinsta.com to an index.html file and create a WARC file named kins-00000.warc.gz .

Wget is powerful, and there are many commands and options you can use. For example, you can use the --mirror command to create a WARC file containing your site’s complete mirror. You can also use the --no-warc-compression command to write uncompressed files, though this is obviously going to take up more space per download. Using the built-in compressor is the optimal approach.

Web archiving has grown from a need to document the rapidly changing shape of the internet. It now has multiple valid applications—for example, in the case of legal files and requirements. Regardless of your need, having a well-structured and organized archive can complement your overall backup strategy.

Fortunately, there are plenty of solutions available to help. Most browsers offer the ability to save a web page on your computer, though solutions such as DevKinsta are also capable tools for the job. However, dedicated archiving tools such as the Wayback Machine , Heritrix , WAIL , and Wget are all particularly robust solutions and offer standardized file formats to work.

Has this article led you to want to archive a website of your own? Share your thoughts and opinions in the comments section below!

Salman Ravoof is a self-taught web developer, writer, creator, and a huge admirer of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Besides tech, he's excited by science, philosophy, photography, arts, cats, and food. Learn more about him on his website , and connect with Salman on Twitter .

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5 Best Wayback Machine Alternatives To Browse Old Websites

The Internet has been around for more than two decades now. During this time, many websites were created and removed. Thankfully, many websites, such as the Wayback Machine, can help us revisit these old web pages. So here is a list of some of the best Wayback Machine Alternatives to help you browse old websites and expired URLs.

Every webpage on the Internet is stored forever for posterity. Thankfully, we can access most archived web information by using sites like Wayback Machine. However, we have also listed other Wayback Machine alternative websites depending on your use case.

What is Wayback Machine?

Wayback Machine is a platform where you can access a digital archive of the World Wide Web. It was founded by the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization. The website allows users to see how websites looked in the past by entering their URLs.

Users can look at how popular websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google looked in the past by using this website. Users can also access content that has been removed or changed from the Internet .

However, the Wayback Machine website can be slow or unresponsive for some web pages. We have put together a list of some of the best Wayback Machine alternative websites.

Best Wayback Machine Alternatives

• Archive.today

Archive.today is a completely free online tool that allows users to navigate to any past page and capture a screenshot. It is pretty simple to use because of its accessibility and easy-to-navigate features. However, it works a bit differently as it captures duplicate pages from both Google and Yandex.

The website also supports Javascript, visuals, page links, and social media applications.

Thanks to these features, you can access many old websites precisely as they were before. With these features, it can support more social media websites than the Wayback Machine, making it even better. Therefore, it is one of the best Wayback Machine alternative websites available.

• Memento Time Travel

Memento Time Travel is another free website that lets you visit a website at a specific moment in time. It is based on Archive.today’s API that’s why it even supports web pages with heavy visualizations. You can even look for a website at a particular time of day.

The website self-archives web pages on servers. If you search for a particular page, it will search the entire server set to look for it. It supports many aspects of a webpage, including text, images, style sheets, etc. Unlike Wayback Machine, you don’t have to worry about data loss, making it a good alternative.

Resurrect Pages/ Go Back in Time

Resurrect Pages and Go Back in Time are browser extensions that allow users to see how a specific page used to look. The extensions use a variety of page caching and archiving services. They use caches from Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Gigablast to make up their library.

These extensions also use archival services such as The Internet Archive, archive.today, and WebCite. These browser extensions are pretty convenient as users can access them just by right-clicking on a web page.

Stillio is pretty different from other Wayback Machine alternatives as it periodically makes archives of selected websites. The service makes these archives based on the settings a user has chosen. The intervals can be hourly, daily, weekly, or whatever we decide.

The website also gives the users information such as search engine indicators and SEO ranking. However, it does not support javascript and other site functions. Due to this, you may find pages with broken links and wrong graphics.

ArchiveBox is an open-source self-hosted web archive and is an excellent alternative to the Wayback Machine. A user can set up the service to preserve any website they want. ArchiveBox is much better than services like Archive.org, as it can save these websites in multiple different formats.

Once you set it up, you can sleep soundly, knowing that your web page will be preserved no matter what happens. This service is mainly used to collect, save, and view websites you want to preserve offline.

Can you Wayback Machine a Google search?

Yes, you can copy any URL and open it in the Wayback Machine. You can choose to see that web page on any date you prefer.

Is there anything else like Wayback Machine?

There are many services available that can archive every webpage on the internet. The following services are most similar to Wayback Machine.

• Time Travel
• Resurrect Pages
• Go Back in Time

Nalin is a tech writer who covers VR, gaming, awesome new gadgets, and the occasional trending affairs of the tech industry. He has been writing about tech and gaming since he started pursuing Journalism in college. He has also previously worked in print organizations like The Statesman and Business Standard. In his free time, he plays FPS games and explores virtual reality.

Reach out to him at @NalinRawat

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National Archives News

New Web Page Highlights Records Held Around the Country

By Pete Lewis | National Archives News

WASHINGTON, May 15, 2024 —  Did you know that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) isn’t just a building in Washington, DC? It’s actually a collection of more than 40 facilities nationwide, including field archives, federal records centers, and presidential libraries.

A selection of images from archival holdings at National Archives facilities around the country. These images and many others will be featured on the new Highlights from Our Holdings at the National Archives web page.

To better highlight the archival holdings nationwide, the National Archives established a new web page: Highlights From Our Holdings at the National Archives . Seven locations are currently linked from the page: Atlanta , Boston , Fort Worth , Philadelphia , Riverside , San Francisco , and Seattle . Each of those pages features 10–14 records from their holdings, and there are 75 featured records thus far.

“In addition to what is already highlighted on the page, we plan to create pages for the National Archives at Chicago, the National Archives at Denver, the National Archives at Kansas City, the National Archives at New York City, and the National Archives at St. Louis, as well as pages highlighting our holdings in College Park, MD, and Washington, DC,” said Erin Townsend, Communications Coordinator, Research Services.

The new web pages contain an array of documents that will be interesting to a wide audience.

"In some cases, we have featured documents relating to well-known individuals, such as the naturalization records of Maria Von Trapp and Marlene Dietrich , the bankruptcy petition for Edgar Allen Poe , and the World War I draft registration card of Herman ‘Babe’ Ruth ,” said Lori Cox-Paul, Director, Field Records Division. “In other cases, we have chosen documents relating to individuals whose stories have been told in movies, such as the memo disbanding the racially segregated work unit Dorothy Vaughan worked in. Her story was told in the film Hidden Figures. We have also included the Slave Manifest listing Solomon Northup, whose story was told in Twelve Years a Slave.”

The web pages will also serve to highlight well-known events, such as the Mount Saint Helens eruption in 1980 , as well as lesser-known, but equally important, stories from American history. Site users can view a photograph of women who served as Yeomanettes in 1918, the first women to enlist in the U.S. Navy, and a photograph of sailors who served on the USS Mason (DE-529), the first U.S. Navy ship with a predominantly Black crew.

“We’ve also highlighted the different formats of records we hold, including an architectural drawing for the initial design of Seattle’s iconic Space Needle and the elevation plan of Boston’s Custom House Tower ,” Cox-Paul said. “And for fun, we included an engineering drawing created by the Forest Service Region 8 office showing detailed designs for cocktails.”

Highlights from Our Holdings at the National Archives is live now.

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Latest Accredited Archive Services announced

Archive Service Accreditation is the UK-wide standard for archive services. Following an Archive Service Accreditation Panel in March, we are pleased to announce the following archive services have been awarded accreditation for the second time:

• Archives and Cornish Studies Service
• Bank of England Archive
• Barnsley Archives and Local Studies
• Lloyds Banking Group Archives
• London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Archives Service
• National Theatre Archive
• Portsmouth History Centre
• Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland
• The Royal Society
• Surrey History Centre
• West Yorkshire Archive Service
• Archives Wigan and Leigh
• University of Kent Special Collections and Archives

All accredited archive services must apply again for accreditation six years after their initial award to retain their accredited status. By achieving accreditation for a second time these archive services have demonstrated a commitment to continuing development of their service and the effective management of change.

Archive Service Accreditation is supported by a partnership of the Archives and Records Association (UK), Archives and Records Council Wales, National Records of Scotland, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Scottish Council on Archives, The National Archives, and the Welsh Government through its Museums, Archives and Libraries Wales division.

View the full list of  accredited archive services

Find out more about Archive Service Accreditation

Tags: Archive Accreditation , archive sector , archive service accreditation panel , archive services

• Google I/O 2024 /

Google now offers ‘web’ search — and an AI opt-out button

For some, the new “web” button will be the biggest improvement in years..

By Sean Hollister , a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.

Share this story

This is not a joke: Google will now let you perform a “web” search. It’s rolling out “web” searches now, and in my early tests on desktop, it’s looking like it could be an incredibly popular change to Google’s search engine.

The optional setting filters out almost all the other blocks of content that Google crams into a search results page, leaving you with links and text — and Google confirms to The Verge that it will block the company’s new AI Overviews as well.

“Isn’t every search a web search? What is Google Search if not the web?” you might rightfully ask.

But independent websites like HouseFresh and Retro Dodo have pointed out how their businesses have gotten “buried deep beneath sponsored posts, Quora advice from 2016, best-of lists from big media sites, and no less than 64 Google Shopping product listings,” in the words of HouseFresh managing editor Gisele Navarro.

Now, with one click, a bunch of those blockers seemingly disappear.

Search for “best home arcade cabinets,” one of Retro Dodo ’s bread-and-butter queries, and it’s no longer buried — it appears on page 1. (Drag our image slider to see the difference.)

HouseFresh still doesn’t get page 1 billing for “best budget air purifiers” — but it’s higher up, and you’re no longer assaulted by an eye-popping number of Google Shopping results as you scroll:

If you search for Wyze cameras, you’ll now get a hint about their lax security practices on page 2 instead of page 3:

I’m not sure it’s an improvement for every search, partly because Google’s modules can be useful, and partly because the company isn’t giving up on self-promotion just because you press the “web” button. Here, you can see Google still gives itself top billing for “Google AR glasses” either way, and its “Top stories” box is arguably a helpful addition:

Which of these results helps you better learn about the Maui wildfires? I’m genuinely not sure:

And when you ask Google who wrote The Lord of the Rings , is there any reason you wouldn’t want Google’s full knowledge graph at your disposal?

Admittedly, it’s an answer that Google isn’t likely to get wrong.

As far as I can tell, the order of Google’s search results seem to be the same regardless of whether you pick “web” or “all.” It doesn’t block links to YouTube videos or Reddit posts or SEO factories... and I still saw (smaller!) sponsored ads from Amazon and Verkada and Wyze push down my search results:

“Web” is just a filter that removes Google’s knowledge panels and featured snippets and Shopping modules — and Google’s new AI Overviews as well, Google spokesperson Ned Adriance confirms to The Verge. “ AI Overviews are a feature in Search, just like a knowledge panel or a featured snippet, so they will not appear when someone uses the web filter for a search.”

It doesn’t magically fix some of the issues facing Google’s search engine . But it is a giant opt-out button for people who’ve been aggravated by some of the company’s seemingly self-serving moves, and a way to preserve the spirit of the 10 blue links even as Google’s AI efforts try to leave them behind.

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Public Liaison for Search, says he’s been asking for something like this for years:

As a next step, I’d like to see Google promote the button to make it more visible. Right now, the company warns that it may not always appear in the primary carousel on desktop at all — you may need to click “More” first and then select “Web.”

Here’s hoping this all works well on mobile, too; I’m not seeing it on my phone yet.

iPhone owners say the latest iOS update is resurfacing deleted nudes

Google opens up its smart home to everyone and will make google tvs home hubs, someone finally made a heat pump that looks good inside your home, lego barad-dûr revealed: sauron’s dark tower from the lord of the rings is $460, microsoft announces the proteus controller, a gamepad for xbox gamers with disabilities.

More from this stream Google I/O 2024: all the news from the developer conference

Adt’s new security system has facial recognition powered by google nest, eve’s android app is finally almost here, thanks to google’s new home apis, intel’s thunderbolt share lets two pcs control each other over a usb cable.

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How the Kendrick Lamar vs. Drake Beef Crashed the Genius Lyrics Website

The furious exchange of diss tracks and the rush to interpret each song briefly overwhelmed Genius, where users can annotate lyrics to songs.

By Alexandra E. Petri

Cole Swain was scrolling through his phone one morning before school last week when he received an alert from YouTube. It was 8:24 a.m. in Los Angeles, where Mr. Swain is a university student, and Kendrick Lamar had just released “ Euphoria ,” a highly anticipated diss track targeting Drake in the escalating showdown between the two rappers.

As Mr. Swain’s group chats and social media feeds blew up, he logged onto Genius, a website where users can transcribe and annotate lyrics to help explain their meaning. A volunteer editor for the site and a fan of Lamar’s, Mr. Swain was ready to dig into the track.

But Genius was apparently not ready for Mr. Swain and the crush of visitors. After nearly two weeks of silence after Drake’s diss record, Lamar’s response on April 30 drove swarms of traffic to Genius, causing it to crash temporarily just as fans were clamoring to pore over what the artist had to say.

“This is crazy,” Mr. Swain, a 19-year-old who is studying bioengineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, recalled thinking. “Everyone is scrambling to write the lyrics as much as everyone wants to read them.”

The feud between Lamar and Drake hit breakneck speed over the weekend, with both musicians trading songs packed with heavy punches. All the while on Genius, a small, collaborative corner of the internet built for those who love music, users like Mr. Swain worked furiously to deconstruct the songs as the hype around the releases exploded.

While many lyric websites include only the transcriptions of songs, Genius is a Wikipedia-like site that allows users to break down complex lyrics, connect the dots to previous songs and provide historical context.

A user’s status on the site , determined in part by the quality and quantity of their activity, grants them different privileges, like the ability to approve or reject other users’ annotations. Editors like Mr. Swain are not paid; the platform is a hobby.

Big releases always cause some chaos, but the volleys between Lamar and Drake have brought a rare level of attention. Editors, moderators, administrators and others were racing to deliver the correct lyrics with smart, sophisticated notes to thousands of followers in real time. Genius’s list of the top 10 most-viewed songs this week was dominated on Wednesday by Lamar and Drake’s series of diss tracks: “Euphoria” had garnered more than seven million views on the site since its release on April 30, according to Genius.

“It’s like the N.B.A. finals,” said Jalin Coleman, 21, who edits under the username @spillretro and uses “they” pronouns. They added, “There is that added pressure.”

There’s also schoolwork and jobs. Mx. Coleman, a rising senior studying creative writing and communications at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, often works simultaneously on annotations and homework.

“I can’t focus on my homework when I know this is happening,” Mx. Coleman said. “I end up procrastinating on it, because I want to be part of this huge thing.” (No assignments were late and no classes were missed, they said.)

Ian, who edits under the Genius username @ibmac26 and asked that only his first name be used for privacy reasons, helped transcribe “Like That,” a song released by the Atlanta rapper Future and the producer Metro Boomin in March that featured a surprise appearance from Lamar and kicked the feud with Drake into high gear. He also worked on the lyrics for Lamar’s “ Meet the Grahams, ” released on Friday night within an hour of Drake’s “ Family Matters. ”

“It feels like either one can throw another punch at any moment, and anticipating what’s going to be said next isn’t even worth it,” Ian said.

Jonathan Goens is a Lamar fan who had been waiting for his response to Drake’s diss tracks. “Especially after the things Drake asked for in ‘Taylor Made Freestyle,’” Mr. Goens, 32, said, referring to the Drake song in which he attacked Lamar using A.I. voice filters to mimic the rappers Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg.

Mr. Goens uses Genius to study the lyrics on surprise releases, particularly when artists don’t include them with the songs, and to reflect on his own analysis through other users’ commentary. He turned to the website to help him pick apart “Euphoria.”

“I was curious to see if things I thought had a deeper meaning could have another meaning — if there were things he was saying that I could not see at all,” Mr. Goens, a forklift driver, said. Mr. Goens said he had been shocked to see Genius down. He continuously refreshed the site without luck, so he instead spun “Euphoria” a few more times until the website was running again.

“The fact that it was down illustrated to me how big it was to so many people to see an artist like Kendrick Lamar respond,” he said.

Ian said there were other times when the website had crashed, including in 2022 after Lamar released his studio album “Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers” and in April after Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department” arrived. But a single song crashing the site is rare, he added. Representatives for Genius or its parent company, MediaLab, could not be reached for comment.

Both Lamar and Drake continued to put out multiple songs after “Euphoria,” but the volley has sat at a standstill since Drake’s release of “The Heart Part 6” Sunday evening.

Mr. Swain plans to take a break from his work as an editor — his roommate has been poking fun at how much time he’s spent on Genius lately, he said.

Unless, of course, Lamar takes a victory lap and drops another track, Mr. Swain added. That would surely pull him off the sidelines.

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Justice Department Finds Nebraska Violates Federal Civil Rights Laws by Unnecessarily Institutionalizing People with Serious Mental Illness

The Justice Department announced today that it found that Nebraska is unnecessarily segregating people with serious mental illness (SMI) in assisted living facilities and day program facilities, in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Olmstead v. L.C . The department found that Nebraska is restricting access to critical community-based services that people with SMI need to live and work in the community.

“Far too often, people with mental health disabilities are institutionalized when they could succeed and thrive in the community,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “It’s time to bring an end to the days of funneling people with disabilities down a dead-end road towards institutionalization and unemployment when they could succeed if provided pathways towards independence and dignity. The Justice Department remains committed to protecting the rights of people with disabilities and ensuring that the ADA’s promise of integration becomes a reality.”

“By increasing its investment in community-based services for Nebraskans with SMI, the State can help these individuals become engaged and vibrant members of their communities,” said U.S. Attorney Susan Lehr for the District of Nebraska.

The ADA and the Olmstead decision require states to make their services for people with disabilities available in the most integrated setting appropriate to each person’s needs — places like people’s homes and workplaces. With the right services, people with SMI can live in their own homes. They can also get and keep jobs where they work alongside people without disabilities doing the same work for the same pay.

Instead of helping Nebraskans with SMI find jobs, Nebraska relies heavily on segregated day programs that group these individuals together in facilities. People with SMI may spend years in segregated day programs with no path to employment. Instead of being able to live in their own homes, many people with SMI are forced to enter assisted living facilities to get help.

Nebraska already offers services that could help its citizens with SMI find jobs and live independently. For example, Nebraska offers a service called “supported employment” that helps people with SMI find jobs and supports them in the workplace. Nebraska also offers services that help people with SMI succeed in their own homes. But the department found that Nebraska limits access to community-based services and has not developed sufficient service capacity to enable people with SMI to avoid unnecessary institutionalization. As a result, many Nebraskans with SMI struggle to access community-based services. Instead, for many Nebraskans with SMI, the only options are institutions and unemployment. Nebraska could expand access to its existing community-based services so that people with SMI can get the support they need to live and work in the community.

The department describes its findings and minimum remedial measures necessary in a letter to Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen. View the department’s letter of findings here .

For more information about the Civil Rights Division, please visit  www.justice.gov/crt . For more information about the ADA, please call the department’s toll-free ADA information line at 800-514-0301 (voice) or (TTY 833-610-1264) or visit  www.ada.gov . ADA complaints may be filed online at  www.ada.gov/complaint .

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