page_title: Internet Archive
section_title: Wayback Machine
hierarchical_section_title: Internet Archive / Web archiving / Wayback Machine
caption_attribution_description: English: IMG_5082 A purchase of additional storage at the Internet Archive Deutsch: Das Internetarchiv hat seinen Speicherplatz erweitert.
context_page_description: The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge." It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, movies/videos, moving images, and millions of books. In addition to its archiving function, the Archive is an activist organization, advocating a free and open Internet. The Internet Archive currently holds over 20 million books and texts, 3 million movies and videos, 400,000 software programs, 7 million audio files, and 400 billion web pages in the Wayback Machine.
  The Internet Archive allows the public to upload and download digital material to its data cluster, but the bulk of its data is collected automatically by its web crawlers, which work to preserve as much of the public web as possible. Its web archive, the Wayback Machine, contains hundreds of billions of web captures. The Archive also oversees one of the world's largest book digitization projects.
context_section_description: The Internet Archive capitalized on the popular use of the term "WABAC Machine" from a segment of The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon (specifically Peabody's Improbable History), and uses the name "Wayback Machine" for its service that allows archives of the World Wide Web to be searched and accessed. This service allows users to view some of the archived web pages. The Wayback Machine was created as a joint effort between Alexa Internet and the Internet Archive when a three-dimensional index was built to allow for the browsing of archived web content. Millions of web sites and their associated data (images, source code, documents, etc.) are saved in a database. The service can be used to see what previous versions of web sites used to look like, to grab original source code from web sites that may no longer be directly available, or to visit web sites that no longer even exist. Not all web sites are available because many web site owners choose to exclude their sites. As with all sites based on data from web crawlers, the Internet Archive misses large areas of the web for a variety of other reasons. A 2004 paper found international biases in the coverage, but deemed them "not intentional".
  A "Save Page Now" archiving feature was made available in October 2013, accessible on the lower right of the Wayback Machine's main page. Once a target URL is entered and saved, the web page will become part of the Wayback Machine.
  Through the Internet address web.archive.org, users can upload to the Wayback Machine a large variety of contents, including PDF and data compression file formats. The Wayback Machine creates a permanent local URL of the upload content, that is accessible in the web, even if not listed while searching in the http://archive.org official website.
  May 12, 1996, is the date of the oldest archived pages on the archive.org WayBack Machine, such as infoseek.com.
  In October 2016, it was announced that the way web pages are counted would be changed, resulting in the decrease of the archived pages counts shown.
caption: A purchase of additional storage at the Internet Archive
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