Matt Van Stone

Yes, yes there is and its name is the Wayback Machine. Ever since 1996 the Wayback Machine has been taking snapshots of internet sites. A quick search for www.yahoo.com brings up a list of hundreds of archived yahoo pages from 1996 to 2005. It can be both fun and practical. You can check out sites that no longer exist like www.scour.net or you can view the evolution of a website over the years like yahoo.com Google.com, or Microsoft.com.

Check out the full post and try it out for yourself.

Now on the practical side, maybe there was some information on a website you really needed access to but it has since been removed. Well wouldn’t it be great if there was a tool that would let you view old versions of internet sites? In comes the Wayback Machine. Type the address of the site you want to view and see if it has an archive of it.

It’s not perfect, some of the sites don’t show images because they havnt been archived. And some sites have been blocked for copyright reasons, but you can spend a good 15 minutes playing with this, and if you know about it it may come in handy one day.

Here are some interesting searches I did:
Microsoft.com from 1996 compared to Microsoft.com from today
Yahoo.com December 1996 compared to Yahoo.com December 2004

Check out the Wayback Machine for yourself.
The Wayback Machine Main Search Page
Heres a link to the computers that archive and run the Wayback Machine