Internet Archives – The Way Back Machine
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I’m a huge fan of nostalgia. I love to reminisce and one of my favourite pass times is to sit down in front of a classic video from my childhood – The Neverending Story, The Dark Crystal, The Labyrinth, Transformers – The Movie and the Princess Bride are some of the movies that formed the foundations of my youth and sit on my shelf as jewels of my video collection.
With the web now reaching it’s early teen years and for me personally almost reaching the 10 years online mark (not quite there yet) I can also reminisce about my Internet past. In particular I love to revisit some of my old websites I no longer maintain.
Back when I was learning HTML I often did complete web design revisions of my magic site, MTGParadise.com. For me it was a chance to flex my design muscles, be a bit creative and much like rearranging the furniture in your room, helps to breath new life into a website.
Thankfully there is an Internet Archive called The Way Back Machine that has been busy over the years archiving all the websites on the world wide web. Not a small job given how much data is out there. The Way Back Machine boasts that it stores “40 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago”.
For a bit of fun take a trip down Internet history and look at what some of the modern pinnacles of the Internet were like back when the net was new.
- Try eBay when it was originally called AuctionWeb
- Yahoo! dates back to 1996
- It looks like Entrepreneur.com was not originally about start-up business
- Try Dell computers back in 1996
- Microsoft is there too!
Practical Applications
As a practical tool the Internet Archive is quite handy to assess your competition or new business ideas. By investigating the evolution of web sites you can see how long it took to get from one point to another (say subscriber numbers to a forum, or auction listing numbers etc) which you can use to compare to your own metrics. You can monitor the changes of competing sites and get ideas from where they have been. As a worse case scenario you can also recapture lost graphics or web design elements you that might have gone missing from your own personal archives.
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[...] If you are really doing deep research, conduct a history search in the Web Archives and see how long the site has been online and how it has changed over the years. [...]
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[...] Once you find a good site that meets your criteria start monitoring and researching it. Check backlinks, investigate it’s history (try the Wayback Machine) and if the site has a community (forums, chatrooms, comment system, helpdesk, etc) see what goes on there. Check the site design, the structure of the links, headings, titles and keyword density. Check the site statistics if they are available (look for those little webstat icons or try Alexa rankings). [...]
You can also use it as blackmail to show people their own websites they made when they were 13.
or you can use it to start a blog about the “old days”
Yaro, You have impeccable taste in movies. Those are also amongst my all time favorites! One you didn’t include is a little known (but very collectible) movie by Disney called The Child of Glass…
Its really cool to see old versions of our website to see how much we have improved.
Shame it didn’t save images.
Interesting article. I am interested in expanding my internet revenue but I have not tried flipping websites so far.