The impact of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine

I recently responded to an appeal from the Internet Archive, seeking testimonials about the value of their Wayback Machine, the tool that allows researchers to go back to earlier snapshots of webpages, including many from long-gone websites. Here's what I wrote:

Tell us about the first time you used the Wayback Machine, or when you first realized the power of web archives. What were you looking for, and why was it important to you?

I can't recall the very first time. My blog contains hundreds of links to the Wayback Machine. An early example is captured in a blog entry giving my readers access to Oklahoma election records that had been lost in the State Election Board's redesign of their website.

Please share a specific example or story where the Wayback Machine played a crucial role in preserving a valuable piece of internet history for you or others.

In 2003, I started a blog, BatesLine.com, focused on local issues in Tulsa and Oklahoma, and it's still going over 20 years later. Many of my entries involved links to local news outlets and other local bloggers. As I revisit some stories from previous years, I update dead links where possible with Wayback Machine links, so that the context for what I wrote is preserved. Local TV stations are particularly bad about redesigning websites and ditching old news stories in the process. Many bloggers gave up after a few years and let their sites and domains lapse. So much has disappeared from the live web in just a short period of time, so I'm very thankful for the Wayback Machine.

Any additional comments or thoughts you'd like to share about your experience with the Wayback Machine?

The biggest disappointment is that the Wayback Machine's crawlers often seems to have struggled with dynamic URLs (the sort with ? in the URL), so that many articles are missing from vanished websites. For example, Urban Tulsa Weekly (urbantulsa.com) was one of many alt-weekly newspapers that used Gyrobase CMS, and many of its articles, even those that I linked from my well-indexed site, are not available in the Wayback Machine. Even a popular and well-organized site like Charles G. Hill's dustbury.com, the longest continuously running Oklahoma blog, which used WordPress and static-looking URLs for a PHP backend, is missing many pages, including the final essay Charles wrote just before his untimely death in 2019. The index page including a link to the essay was captured, but not the essay itself. This is heartbreaking and hard to comprehend.

If you, too, are thankful for the Wayback Machine, you can show your appreciation with a tax-deductible contribution to the Internet Archive. They currently store over 99 petabytes of data, including 625 billion webpages going back to the earliest days of the World-Wide Web, and they make it all available for free.

MORE: The Internet Archive's Community Webs initiative has helped 175 libraries and archives to establish their own digital archives, including two in Oklahoma -- OKC's Metropolitan Library System and the Choctaw Cultural Center. They just received a $750,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to expand that program.