The Internet Archive – Learn Everything You Ever Wanted

The Internet Archive, also referred to as the WayBack Machine allows users to do just that, go way back and find out all sorts of cool facts throughout history. It is filled with files from audio, video, documents, images and more that researchers, scholars, even general public can use for various purposes. It’s as easy as doing a quick search for what you’re looking for, or you can browse through and see what cool things you find.

Idea 9/10

The Archive is a database that is filled with all types of cool information that can prove to be helpful in different situations. Researchers are able to find things from the past that they can use in their papers, the public can learn random facts and scholars can even use it to learn more about their field of study.

We think the database is a great source to find all types of things, and it includes audio, texts, images, even web pages that have been archived and software too.

Design 9/10

We found the design of the site to be rather fun to navigate and simple to use. You have the option to brose various categories and scrolling down the home page you are able to find all types of cool things to look back on. If you know a certain URL that you would like to see how it looked in the past, you can type it in the WayBackMachine search bar and hit enter! It’s like online time travel.

Usability 10/10

We wanted to see if we could find old images of buildings, so we did a quick search and found a bunch of great images. We also wanted to check out the WayBackMachine and see how things looked, well, way back when. We figured, what better way to have a flashback than to use it for Yahoo.com. It showed that the site had been saved over 65,000 times since October, 1996. We choose to view how the page appeared on March 2nd, 1999. So, who else remembers Yahoo when the home page had a Craigslist appearance?

Price 10/10

As always, it is rather hard to beat the price of free. The only way we can really think to beat ‘free’ is to pay users to use their service, which occurs on some sites, but that’s a different subject. There’s not much else to say on this area.

Utility 10/10

In the end, we like the concept as it can prove to be useful to many people in various different fields of study or research and also provides a fun way for the common person to just learn new things from history.

Additionally, the WayBackMachine gives great insight on how pages looked in the past and gives a real perspective on how they have improved over the years, especially when considering how much of a change some sites have went under in just the last 5 years or so. Some sites may not have changed much since the 90’s though, which is also cool to see.

Pros
+ Completely free
+ Wide range of web pages

Cons
– Design could use improvement