The Internet Wayback Machine

In the old cartoon "Peabody and Sherman," Mister Peabody, a bespeckled intellectual dog, would take his boy Sherman into the past to study history with his "Wayback Machine."

We can do the same thing on the Internet using the Internet Way Back Machine. This is not only amusing but has some serious business uses.

For example, The SANS Institute is a client of mine. If I want a good historical perspective of them, the Internet Way Back Machine has over 100 copies of their website archived from wayback in 1997 when it was one page long!

I do some work for Pinnacle Training.
A very recent Press Release on their site says they are merging with New Horizons Computer Learning Centers, and current Pinnacle President Chris Roy will be the president of United Training. Let's check out United Training's website - hmmm, it has a nice letter from the president Chris Roy.

The Wayback Machine shows about 50 archived versions of the United Technologies site from 2001. Looking at the first copy I see that Chris has always been president and that same letter!

I won't speculate what this information means, but certainly I have gleaned some perhaps extremely useful business information from the Wayback Machine.

There is also some interesting and useful info available on New Horizons Computer Learning Centers. They seem like a good fit with Pinnacle, both now as well as historically.

What if there is something about your website you want to simply have go away?? Search Engines respect preferences specified in the "robots.txt" file. With this file, a site can specify that certain parts of the website are not to be searched or indexed. The Internet Wayback Machine respects the robots.txt file, and will not show archived parts of your website the current robots.txt file says to ignore.

Of course there are other caches of website information as well, for example Google, but none as large as the Internet Way Back Machine. Not surprisingly Google doesn't retroactively honor the robots.txt file, although its cache only holds a single and typically recent copy of a webpage.