The Wayback Machine
Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2025 9:32 am
The importance of the internet. So much of what humanity publishes and makes available lives only on the internet. Given how much time we spend online, the internet has become a central medium of human expression, history, and culture.
The fragile and ephemeral nature of the internet. Graham shared two stats that underscore how fragile today’s internet is:
A study found that of the two million hyperlinks in New York Times articles from 1996 to 2019, 25% of all links were broken (described as link rot).
The Wayback Machine has fixed 20 million broken links in Wikipedia articles with the correct ones.
“The web itself is a living thing. Webpages change. They go away on quite a frequent basis. There’s no backup system or version control system for the web,” Graham explained. That is, except for archives phone number database like the Wayback Machine.
The Wayback Machine is a “time machine for the web,” in Graham’s words. It allows users to trace the evolution (or disappearance) of a webpage over time, enabling them to establish a record of what happened on the internet.
For example, the Apple.com URL has been archived 539,000 times since its first archived page in October 1996.
The Wayback Machine has archived over 866 billion webpages in its 28-year history. Today, it archives hundreds of millions of webpages every day and has become one of the most important archives of online content in the world.
How it works
The Wayback Machine “crawls” the web and downloads publicly accessible information. Webpages, documents, and data are stored with a time-stamped URL.
For information that’s not publicly accessible, Internet Archive offers web archiving services through Archive-It for 1,200 organizations in 24 countries around the world (from libraries to research institutions).
The fragile and ephemeral nature of the internet. Graham shared two stats that underscore how fragile today’s internet is:
A study found that of the two million hyperlinks in New York Times articles from 1996 to 2019, 25% of all links were broken (described as link rot).
The Wayback Machine has fixed 20 million broken links in Wikipedia articles with the correct ones.
“The web itself is a living thing. Webpages change. They go away on quite a frequent basis. There’s no backup system or version control system for the web,” Graham explained. That is, except for archives phone number database like the Wayback Machine.
The Wayback Machine is a “time machine for the web,” in Graham’s words. It allows users to trace the evolution (or disappearance) of a webpage over time, enabling them to establish a record of what happened on the internet.
For example, the Apple.com URL has been archived 539,000 times since its first archived page in October 1996.
The Wayback Machine has archived over 866 billion webpages in its 28-year history. Today, it archives hundreds of millions of webpages every day and has become one of the most important archives of online content in the world.
How it works
The Wayback Machine “crawls” the web and downloads publicly accessible information. Webpages, documents, and data are stored with a time-stamped URL.
For information that’s not publicly accessible, Internet Archive offers web archiving services through Archive-It for 1,200 organizations in 24 countries around the world (from libraries to research institutions).