Wayback Machine is one of the best internet archiving websites, being used by millions of people everyday. Many businesses depend on it to create business strategies and understand their competitors. Wayback Machine will let anyone see history of an archived website and how it was developed.
There can be numerous uses of it, some of them include, understanding competitor development, accessing deleted information and accessing content of a down website. Having access to Wayback Machine all the time is extremely important, as it is mostly used in critical situations. Unfortunately, there is no 100% guarantee that a website will never be down, so you need to prepare for that.
You can find a Wayback Machine alternative that may help you if the Wayback Machine website is down. Furthermore, you might be looking to try something new with a little bit different features. Whatever the reason is, if you are looking for a Wayback Machine Alternative, then we are here to help.
Today, we are going to introduce two Wayback Machine alternatives. Although, they are not even close to what Wayback Machine can offer, but they do offer some unique features, that may force you to use them.
1. Screenshots
Screenshots can be a good alternative to Wayback Machine, if you want to see how a website actually looked like in the past. Internet archiving websites, including Wayback Machine, copy the web page code and save it for future reference. However, Screenshots just takes a snapshot of a web page and then archives it.
How it Works
Screenshots use the WHOIS database of DomainTools to find the websites to archive and then use snapshots to make a record of them. The time and frequency of taking snapshots for a particular website depends on how many times it got updated with new content.
If a website gets updated frequently with big changes, then it will also be archived more often and you will find more snapshots of it in Screenshots’ history. However, if a website doesn’t get updated frequently or there are not many changes in the design of the website, then you should expect fewer snapshots.
So far, Screenshots has been able to amass over 250 millions snapshots, which is actually nothing compared to 436 billion pages collected by Wayback Machine. However in our experience, Screenshots covered snapshots of many of the popular websites quite well. They had many snapshots of blogs, but not so many of business websites.
Although, snapshots for average websites that have been created hardly a year ago and don’t have much presence were not archived by Screenshots. On the other hand, Wayback Machine showed their complete history. So we guess Screenshots is best when you want to check history of popular websites.
Practical Use
Using Screenshots is dead simple, you either browse snapshots of featured images based on news, popularity and frequency of updates or search for a particular website in the search bar. While searching, make sure you enter complete address, for example “beebom.com” not “beebom”.
When you will search, you will find all the snapshots in a horizontal pane with a blue slider below it. You will find the latest snapshot taken date at the left of the pane and oldest on the right.
To search snapshots, just start moving the slider from left to right and you will see all the snapshots with the date they were taken, below them. Clicking on the snapshots will show a preview of them below.
You will see all the details about the website you searched for in the right panel to the Preview window. The details include, latest and oldest screenshots date, total number of screenshots, WHOIS first history record for the domain, total number of domains on the same hosting and link to complete WHOIS record of the website. You will also find some similar websites that you may like to checkout.
Key Features: Takes screeshonts instead of copying code, easy to use with simple interface and provides complete WHOIS record of the domain.
Cons: Takes screenshots less frequently and doesn’t archives less popular websites.
2. Archive.is
Archive.is is another good alternative to Wayback Machine and arguably better than Screenshots for most people. It is not one of the most attractive websites or easy to navigate, but its database and archiving methods makes up for it.
Archive.is will let you both search for website history and let you take a screenshot of any domain on demand, which will be saved for everyone to see. This makes it a perfect solution to get all the details about a website, including data and graphical details.
How it Works
Archive.is archives a website on demand or according to the frequency of the activities on a particular website. It will take both screenshot and code of a website while archiving. However, unlike Wayback Machine it doesn’t sends crawlers to archive web pages. This means a website can’t stop Archive.is from archiving using a robot.txt file.
If there is a website that may be blocking Wayback Machine from crawling its site, then you should opt for Archive.is to get a peek.
Practical Use
The website of Archive.is is not nearly as attractive as Wayback Machine or Screenshots. Although, it is quite simple to navigate with least options to worry about. On the main page, you will find two search bars, one in red at the top and other in blue at the bottom. Red search bar is where you can demand archiving of a web page, and in the blue, you can check the history of any website.
Demand Archive
In the red search bar, you can demand archiving of any website and Archive.is will copy code and take a screenshot of it. Just enter the URL of the website page in the search bar, and click on “save the page”.
Archive.is will start processing and after a short delay (depending on the page size), you will see the archived page and a screenshot of it.
Note: You are not limited to just adding Landing page URL of a particular website, you can add URL of any page of a website. Just access the page you want to archive and copy/paste its URL in the archive.is search, it will be archived.
Check Archived History of a Website
In the blue search bar below, you can enter the URL of a website, and you will see all its history. There will be two options, Oldest and Newest. Oldest just contains the oldest archived web page, and Newest contains the latest archived pages and going back from there.
You will see all the archived pages, starting from the latest and going backwards along with the data mentioned below each web page. You can just click on any webpage to see its details.
The archived web page will open up and you can easily scroll between it. You can click on “Screenshot” to see a screenshot of that particular web page.
You can also share the web page over social networks by clicking on “share”. The web page can also be downloaded for future reference, just click on “Download” to download the results.
In our results, Screenshots archived 9gag 21 times and on the other hand, Archive.is archived it 1063 times. You can weigh the frequency of archiving website with this little example.
Key Features: Archives both code and screenshot of a web page, huge database, share & download results, and request for archiving of any website any time.
Cons: Unattractive interface, hard to navigate to reach the required web page and doesn’t provide much information about a particular web page.
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Conclusion
When it comes to usability, Archive.is is far better alternative to Wayback Machine than Screenshots. However, easy navigation, attractive interface and tons of extra information are some key points of Screenshots that some people may prefer.
