When a Web site shuts down, is it gone forever or is there a copy of it somewhere for research purposes?
The site’s creator may still have the files that made up the original Web site, but locating a public copy of it may prove elusive. Still, you may be able to find a preserved version of the site in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, a service that has been crawling and copying the Web since 1996.
Even though it has well more than 240 billion Web pages (and counting) in its archive, the Wayback Machine does not have samples from every site that went online. Sites that were password-protected, or that escaped the attention of the Wayback software that automatically crawls the Web looking for pages to copy, were probably excluded. Web site owners who do not (or did not) want their pages to be indexed and copied can exclude their content from the collection as well.
But if a long-gone Web site is still anywhere to be found, the Wayback Machine is a good place to look first. To use it, visit the site, type the URL of the site you want to dig up in the Wayback Machine address bar and click the Take Me Back button.
If the site you seek has been archived, you may even be able to see different versions of it spanning its existence and select a copy from a specific month or year. The Frequently Asked Questions page has more information about how the Wayback Machine works, the scope of the collection and technical issues.
