Wednesday Websites We Love | The Wayback Machine

Every Wednesday, we like to show you websites we love because of their good web design or solid web development. This week’s Wednesday Website We Love is just plain awesome and fun to use: Archive.org/web, aka The Wayback Machine.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of amazing back-end development that goes into making this website possible. The Wayback Machine (a reference from Rocky and Bullwinkle, by the way), is an archive of every publicly accessible web page going to back to 1996. To date, these guys have saved 427 billion web pages which is 23 petabytes of data and is currently growing at a rate of 50-60 terabytes per week. How crazy is that??

The cool part is that you can input any website you want and see what it looked like in the past. Take Apple, for example; Here’s what it looked like in 1998:

Here’s what it looks like now:

It’s incredible to see how far web design and development has come within 20 years! And in Apple’s case, how far technology has come! This is a great tool to help you see the evolution of a business as well.

The Wayback Machine doesn’t index every web page, however. Any page that is password-protected, on a secure server, tagged with a “robot exclusion” text document, and pages accessed only by filling out a form are not included in the archive. A website owner can also directly request the removal of their site from the archive.

So go ahead, type in your favorite website and see what it looked like 10 years ago. Some are pretty hilarious! I’ll leave you with one of my favorites, CBDMarketing.com back in 2003, which is a local Chicago marketing agency.