The Wayback Machine site, part of the non-profit Internet Archive project, has been capturing the content of websites, including ones that have long since shut down, for decades. It"s been a huge resource for people who want to find out what has been published on the World Wide Web over the past 25 years. However, it"s also been very difficult to navigate the site to get the information that you need.
Today, the Internet Archive has announced a new partnership with Google that will let people use Google Search to directly find links to whatever they are searching for on the Wayback Machine site.
In a blog post today, the Internet Archive stated:
To access this new feature, conduct a search on Google as usual. Next to each search result, you’ll find three dots—clicking on these will bring up the “About this Result” panel. Within this panel, select “More About This Page” to reveal a link to the Wayback Machine page for that website.
Through this direct link, you’ll be able to view previous versions of a webpage via the Wayback Machine, offering a snapshot of how it appeared at different points in time.
Google set a statement to 9to5Google about this new partnership:
We know that many people, including those in the research community, value being able to see previous versions of webpages when available. That’s why we’ve added links to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to our ‘About this page’ feature, to give people quick context and make this helpful information easily accessible through Search.
This will likely please many Google Search users who previously have been able to access earlier versions of websites in a search result with Google"s cached pages feature. The ability to view those pages was removed from Google Search earlier in 2024.