The Wayback Machine Updates Show When A Web Page Was Updated And What Changed

With the millions of websites and their billions of web pages, changes can be very difficult to log. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is the solution.

The Wayback Machine is considered one of the popular but old website. For reasons, it's one of the few famous online services that rarely change. Over the years, the site that archives the World Wide Web doesn't introduce anything much in terms of features.

But when it does, it did that for the better.

This time, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine introduced 'Changes'. Initially available in beta, the tool shows users the date a web page experienced a changed, what clearly showing what was changed on it.

To use the feature, users can simply an URL to the search bar, to make the Wayback Machine analyze all the screenshots it has taken since the page was published, just like usual.

But this time, it goes more than just that, as it displays color-coded calendar.

Wayback Machine's Changes
An example for the Internet Archive's about page, with color-coded calendar on each available entry

The colors are meant to show the degree of relative change from one archive to another. The colors range from grey for low degree of change, to blue for high degree of change

From there, users can select two different dates and compare the changes with screenshots that are highlighted in blue for content addition, and yellow for content deletion.

It can also go further than that, as the tool can also indicate changes in visual elements, like the header and navigation buttons.

For anyone using the Wayback Machine, they can clearly see any change that a web page has undergone, and can finally know when a content of a page has been modified for whatever reason.

And if a web page has never been changed since it was published, users can find it out immediately rather than manually comparing different screenshots.

Wayback Machine's Changes
An example showing how the Internet Archive's about page changed in three years

For decades the Wayback Machine records websites on the web and their "more than 366 billion web pages" to make sure that information is always there whenever people need them. But previously, users have no way to know when a web page experienced a change, and what was changed on it.

Before Changes is available, the only way to look back on when and how a page was changed was to manually click through and view every screenshot available at the Wayback Machine.

This is inconvenient and can be a painful task, especially when dealing with pages that changed and crawled frequently.

With Changes, the Wayback Machine is clearly giving a way to make the process a lot easier.

For marketers, this can be that SEO tool for diagnosing website issues. For example, they can see what changed on a web page over a period of time to analyze the cause of a gradual rise or decline in rankings.

Published: 
01/07/2019