Google Search Adds Links to Internet Archive
In a significant step forward for digital preservation, Google Search is now making it easier than ever to access the past. Starting today, users everywhere can view archived versions of webpages directly through Google Search, with a simple link to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
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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.
This makes it easier to see previous versions of a page. It would also be useful if Google could search pages that are in the archive but no longer available on the Web. For example, many articles and blog posts that I’ve linked to are on sites that are now defunct. I can find them in the Wayback Machine because I have the URL. But without that key, even if I know some of the text on the page, I can’t really search for it in the archive.
Ben Schoon (via Hacker News):
Google Search makes it easy to find information, but occasionally you need historical context for a page that may have been recently updated. That was previously possible to a certain extent through cached pages in Search, but that functionality was removed earlier this year.
Previously:
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I was the content manager for a nonprofit back in the early 2000s and it was doing some interesting, innovative work around a particular initiative; I spent a lot of time documenting its efforts in reports, newsletter articles, and maps.
Someone asked about it on Reddit recently and I was shocked that there was barely anything about this program available to search inquiries. Since I knew where to look I could go to archive.org and provide lots of links. Thank goodness for archive.org but I may be one of the few people who could find it now.
It’s amazing that a program that existed on the open web in relatively recent times is so invisible.
