2 months ago
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What was once dead now lives again through the power of the Internet Archive. Seven months after killing the ability to see old versions of websites through Google, the search engine has partnered with the archive and is directly linking to its cached versions of websites on the Wayback Machine.
Websites change over time. The information on a URL constantly evolves. News stories are changed, blogs are stealth-edited, and sometimes stuff just stops working. For more than 20 years, Google offered a way for users to view into the past and see stripped-down and archived versions of old sites.
Back in February, it killed off the feature. “Yes, it’s been removed,” Google search liaison Danny Sullivan said on X at the time. “I know, it’s sad. I’m sad too. It’s one of our oldest features. But it was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it. Personally, I hope that maybe we’ll add links to @internetarchive from where we had the cache link before, within About This Result.”
It was a throwaway comment made on X, not a promise. Miraculously, however, it’s come to pass. According to a blog on the Internet Archive, users can see Wayback Machine links by doing a search as normal and then clicking the three dots next to the URL in the results. This will open up a new tab on the browser. Click “more about this page” to see a link to the Wayback archives. “Through this direct link, you’ll be able to view previous versions of a webpage via the Wayback Machine, offering a snapshot of how it appeared at different points in time,” the Archive said.
In a statement about the change, Google said it knew how important old versions of websites were. “We know that many people, including those in the research community, value being able to see previous versions of webpages when available. That’s why we’ve added links to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to our ‘About this page’ feature, to give people quick context and make this helpful information easily accessible through Search,” it said.
Wayback Machine director Mark Graham explained the importance of archival work in a post on the Archive. “The web is aging, and with it, countless URLs now lead to digital ghosts. Businesses fold, governments shift, disasters strike, and content management systems evolve—all erasing swaths of online history,” he said. “Sometimes, creators themselves hit delete, or bow to political pressure. Enter the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine: for more than 25 years, it’s been preserving snapshots of the public web. This digital time capsule transforms our ‘now-only’ browsing into a journey through internet history. And now, it’s just a click away from Google search results, opening a portal to a fuller, richer web—one that remembers what others have forgotten.”
As the web continues to decay and the past slips away from us, the work of archiving sites such as the Wayback Machine will be instrumental in building a fuller picture of the fast. It sucks that Google got rid of its cache feature, but it’s laudable that it teamed with the Internet Archive to revive it.
