Want to see what Yahoo looked like 10 years ago?

Posted on February 7, 2008 at 7:22 am

The Internet Archives (located at www.archive.org) indexes and archives most major websites and saves them as a history record of our time. Just like physical libraries store books and newspapers to preserve our culture and heritage, the Internet Archives stores web pages (as well as other digital media including texts, audios, moving images, and software).

internet archive

Have you ever wondered what a web page used to look like? Or wanted to research something that someone took off-line last year? The Internet Archives are a great way to do that research. The archives are a non-profit, free source of information that is cataloged in an easy to search method. For example, if you wanted to find out how Yahoo! has changed their look over the last 10 years, you could pull up their webpages over the years as shown below.

Yahoo! in 1996

1996 yahoo

Yahoo! in 2002

2002 yahoo

In addition to checking out your favorite websites to see what they used to look like, the Internet Archive is also useful for digging up old information as well. The archives save not only the page you searched for, but the entire site around that page as well. For example, if you wanted to research what TV shows were playing on Fox in 2002, all you would have to do is search for www.fox.com on the archives and then you can navigate around the archive site almost as if it is still a live web page.

Overall, the Internet Archives (www.archives.org) is an amazing site. Here’s the top three reasons that it needs to continue to archive sites:

1. To preserve the history of the internet and of our current cultures

2. To assist with research and fact finding online

3. To amuse us when we are bored and want to travel back in time through old web pages

What sites do you think have changed the most over the years? Post them here to compare.

This is a guest post by Karen Worthy, a tech enthusiast.

Technorati Tags: Internet Archives, websites, webpages, web pages, archives, internet, old web pages, previous versions of web sites, online library, historical reference, internet history

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3 Responses to “Want to see what Yahoo looked like 10 years ago?”

Samantha said on : February 7th, 2008 at 9:05 pm

Check out http://www.cnn.com on the archives. I was able to go back and read the headlines from 9/11 as it was unfolding. Very interesting.

Nguyễn Quí Long said on : February 13th, 2008 at 9:21 pm

Thanks for share.

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