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.
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.
================================