The
Wayback Machine is a digital archive of Internet content, consisting of
snapshots of web pages across time. It was founded by the Internet Archive
which is a non-profit organization in San Francisco. It gives the user a chance
to go back in time and see what websites looked like in the past. It
launched in 2001 with over 452 billion pages added to the archive. Also, there
was some controversy over whether creating archive pages without the owner’s
permission was copyright infringement in certain jurisdictions.
The
Wayback Machine’s software has been developed to go over the web and download
all the publicly accessible World Wide Web pages, the Gopher hierarchy, the
Netnews (Usenet) bulletin board system, and downloadable software.

If
you are working on your new website and planning on launching it soon, you
might want to peek into the history of the most successful websites in the same
niche like its layout, screenshots, development strategy and other details, you
are in the right place!
In
this article, we’ll talk about the best Wayback Machine Alternative Sites that
exist. You will find a list below of the 7 most important Wayback Machine
Alternative websites:
Archive.is (http://archive.is) It is
considered one of the biggest Wayback machine website alternatives. To be
honest, archive.is doesn’t have a nice user-friendly interface, but since
it has a really good method of archiving the website history, it’s still
considered the best out there. Archive.is stores not only the screenshot
of the webpage but also the HTML code of the site. It also allows you to
look up information about any webpage you wish to, including data and
graphical history. You can also archive contents of live websites with the
help of archive.is to use them in the future. There are two search fields
on the archive.is the homepage: the first one lets you save the web pages
on-demand, and the second one is a box that lets you search for archived
pages.
Screenshots (http://www.screenshots.com) The screenshots have a database of 250 million current and also historic images of websites, which, compared to the Wayback Machine is much smaller but still larger than other alternatives available. It has a user-friendly interface, very easy to use: you just need to enter the URL of the web page in the search field and press enter. In just a few seconds you will be provided with the screenshot of details regarding the website. Screenshots also make use of the Domain Tools API allowing you to get more information about a certain website, including the domain it was first registered or how many times it has been sold to other people.
Competitor
Screenshots (www.competitorscreenshots.com): It is quite
similar to the Screenshots with a few differences. It is meant to help you
peek into your competitor's marketing strategies, providing you
screenshots of their email campaigns and social media activities. In order
to gain these details and important information, you need to sign up and
have an active account on their website. It is free, and it comes with
limited access to your competitor’s data for a period of 60 days only.
Although, you have the opportunity to upgrade to a premium account which
comes with lots of benefits and you’ll have access to more detailed
information.
ITools (http://itools.com/internet/web-site-information) ITools is a
great alternative for the Wayback Machine and It offers a large variety of
information beyond the screenshots and its coding structure. It is a
web-archive but it functions as a website analyzer as well, which offers
you detailed information about the traffic of the website, statistics,
popularity of the given website, contact information and more. In order to
provide details about a certain website, ITools uses popular Alexa tools.
When you first see the home page of the website, it might confuse you a
little bit, but you will get used to it in a short time.
Domain Tools
(http://research.domaintools.com/research/screenshot-history) Domain Tools
is a very useful web-archiving website. It offers the easiest interface to
its users. On this website you get the see the screenshot of the details
of the website you’re looking for and you can also access information
about how the website progressed in terms of design, website owner contact
details, or when the website was registered.
Page Freezer
(http://www.pagefreezer.com) Page Freezer
offers a wide range of features which makes it very easy to handle for its
users. Either you want to look up information about your competitor’s
websites, or you want to analyze your own website, Page Freezer will do
the job for you and provide you the information you need. It is a very
secure and reliable site with the most advanced features. While most of
the archive websites provide details about a website’s past information,
Page Freezer also offers a real-time experience of the website as if it’s
still running in the past. It also offers social media archiving of the
websites.
YubNub (http://yubnub.org) YubNub is a
very simple and easy-to-use tool that offers information about a website
you wish to find. It does not have as many features as Page Freezer, but
its simplicity makes it very convenient for many especially for basic
uses. You just need to enter the URL of the website on the YubNub’s
homepage and hit enter and you’ll get information about the website you’re
looking for in a few seconds.
Conclusion
As
you can see, there are many options when it comes to finding alternatives to
the Wayback Machine. In
this article, we listed the most popular ones such as Archive.is, Screenshots,
Competitor Screenshots, ITools, Domain Tools, Page Freezer and YubNub. They are
very useful and handy when it comes to finding information online on a
website’s past and not only. We
hope this article was helpful!
1 Comments
I’m currently building an application for archiving websites called My Site Archive, and think it would make a good addition to this list. The application captures screenshots, downloads source code, and monitors DNS records helping people keep track of changes on their websites over time.
ReplyDeleteI know you invested a lot of time researching and vetting the services and platforms listed in this article, so I want to make sure you have a chance to actually give My Site Archive a test drive. You can sign up for a free 30-day trial and decide for yourself if it’s worth adding to your article. Otherwise, feel free to check out the 2-minute demo.
https://www.mysitearchive.com/