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Wayback Machine

Digital archive founded by the Internet Archive / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit based in San Francisco, California. Created in 1996 and launched to the public in 2001, it allows the user to go "back in time" and see how websites looked in the past. Its founders, Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat, developed the Wayback Machine to provide "universal access to all knowledge" by preserving archived copies of defunct web pages.[1]

Quick facts: Type of site, Founded, Area served, Owne... ▼
Wayback Machine
Type of site
Archive
Founded
  • May 10, 1996; 26 years ago (1996-05-10) (private)
  • October 24, 2001; 21 years ago (2001-10-24) (public)
Area servedWorldwide (except China and Bahrain)
OwnerInternet Archive
URLweb.archive.org
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional
Current statusActive
Written inJava, Python
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Launched on May 10, 1996, the Wayback Machine had saved more than 38.2 million web pages at the end of 2009. As of January 2023, the Wayback Machine has archived more than 779 billion web pages.[2]