The Wayback Machine has indexed over 400 billion webpages since 1996

Shawn Knight

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The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has successfully indexed more than 400 billion webpages. It’s a significant achievement and to celebrate, the archive recently published a list of other Wayback Machine highlights since it began indexing the web nearly 20 years ago.

For those unfamiliar, the Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web created and maintained by the non-profit Internet Archive. The service allows visitors to view webpages as they appeared during different points in time starting as early as 1996.

As the celebratory blog post points out, the Wayback Machine was first opened to the public in 2001 despite having crawled the web for five years. In 2006, a service called Archive-It was launched which allowed libraries that subscribe to the service to create curated collections of valuable web content.

wayback machine web websites internet archive

Three years later in 2009, the Internet Archive teamed up with Sun Microsystems to launch a new datacenter designed to store the entire web archive. The 3 petabyte center handled 500 requests per second and was housed in a shipping container.

More recently, new features were added to the Wayback Machine including the ability to see newly crawled content an hour after it was captured, a “Save Page” feature that allows anyone to archive a page on demand and an effort to fix broken links on the web.

If you haven’t yet checked out the Wayback Machine, it’s certainly worth a look. Seeing the web as it was years ago shows us just how far technology and design have come in a relatively short period of time.

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I graduated from high school in 1996 and in 1996 my high school had it's first website. I helped makign the page from the final exam schedule
 
99 from 100 get this

Hrm.


Wayback Machine doesn't have that page archived.
This page is available on the web!
 
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