COMPARING VERSIONS OF WEBSITES USING THE WAYBACK MACHINE

DON'S FREEWARE CORNER - JUN 2021

COMPARING VERSIONS OF WEBSITES USING THE WAYBACK MACHINE

©2021 Donald R. Snow - Last updated 2021-06-06

Don's Freeware Corner articles are printed in the UTAH VALLEY TECHNOLOGY AND GENEALOGY GROUP (UVTAGG) Newsletter TAGGology each month and are posted on his Class Notes Page https://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html where there may be corrections and updates.
============================================

INTERNET ARCHIVE

The Internet Archive -- https://archive.org/ -- is a website with the goal of preserving the worlds knowledge and making it available to everyone for free.  There are several articles and sets of notes on my website about it.  It is supported by donations, mostly from large corporations, and stores copies of books, magazines, "snapshots" of the entire internet, videos, TV shows, recordings, concerts, and much more.  It was started in 1996 by Brewster Kahle and has many uses for family history and other projects.  For items out-of-copyright you can usually download them to your own computer for free.  Items still in copyright allow snippet views or sound bytes for free.  Many items in copyright can be checked out like library books.  The Wayback Machine is where copies of nearly all websites are stored and which can be searched and viewed for old websites.  This was started in 1996, so if you want to see how a website looked  then or has changed over the years, it is probably there.  This is especially helpful for websites that have been taken down or changed and you want to see the old version.  It has many helpful features and this Freeware Corner article discusses one of them, comparing versions of websites.  Below is a screenshot of the home page of Internet Archive.

https://uvtagg.org
Screenshot of Internet Archive Home Page

THE WAYBACK MACHINE ON THE INTERNET ARCHIVE

Note that near the top of the Internet Archive Home page is The Wayback Machine. This gets its name from a cartoon many years ago of Bullwinkle and the Professor with their Wayback Machine which would take them back in time. This is the place where "snapshots" of the internet are stored. They "crawl" the internet every few days and save all the webpages, and currently have over 500 billion old webpages stored. When you enter the URL, a calendar shows you the dates they scanned that webpage.  Click on a date to see what it looked like then. This is helpful for history, family history, journalism, and many other subjects, since it is estimated that about one-third of all websites change every year. And many are deleted from the internet for various reasons. Using the Wayback Machine you can see websites that are now deleted and follow the changes of a website.  An interesting example is the history of the UVTAGG.org website which was called UVPAFUG.org in the early days,

COMPARING VERSIONS OF WEBSITES

On the WayBack Machine page, after you enter a URL, there are several things you can do. The Calendar shows the dates that URL was scanned and you can click on any date to see what it looked like then. The word Compare opens two calendars with the dates that URL was scanned and allows you to select any two dates. The date you select from the top calendar will be shown in the left panel and the date you select from the bottom calendar will be shown in the right panel. It will find the two versions of the URL and show them in the side-by-side panels. All changes will be shown in blue and yellow colors. Below is a comparison screenshot of my Clas Notes webpage in May of 2020 (last year) and May of 2021 (this year).


Comparison of Don's Class Notes Home Page May 2020 (Left) and May 2021 (Right)
Color Coding Indicates Changes

CONCLUSIONS

The Wayback Machine on Internet Archive is a very useful tool in family history and other subjects.  It stores old versions of webpages and, among many other things, allows comparing them from different dates it was scanned.  This Freeware Corner article has been about how to do the comparisons.  A more in-depth article about comparisons is at  -- https://gijn.org/2021/05/05/tips-for-using-the-internet-archives-wayback-machine-in-your-next-investigation/ .  There are many other things the Wayback Machine does and will be topics for other Freeware Corner articles.
================================