Wayback Machine

If you type "wayback machine" into a Google search box and click on the first entry, "Internet Archive: Wayback Machine," you will end up at https://archive.org/web/. At the top there is a search box, with a suggested search prefix, "http://". That invites you to enter the URL (Universal Resource Locator) of a web site you wish to search.

For example, the URL of the Republican National Committee is https://www.gop.com/. If you type that entry and click on "BROWSE HISTORY," it indicates "Saved 4,672 times between January 14, 1997 and December 18, 2016 [today's date]." You can see all the dates which are archived for the GOP site. Clicking on any date will show you what the web page looked like on that day.

Picking a date at random -- February 11, 2016 -- it shows you that five snapshots of the site were taken on that day. Clicking on any one of those snapshots shows you what the site looked like at that particular time. Clicking on each of them, one after another, shows you the changes that were made to the site on that date.

The site only indicates snapshots that were taken. For example, you'll notice that no snapshots were taken of the site between February 12 and February 21. Perhaps there were no changes to the site in that time; or perhaps there were changes, but no contributor to the Wayback Machine posted a snapshot.

Very useful for keeping people honest when they try to scrub web posts that later prove embarrassing! For example, Alex Jones at Infowars (a blog and radio show frequented and endorsed by one Donald J. Trump) posted vicious, disgusting lies claiming that Hillary Clinton personally raped children and cut them up into chunks. Long after Pizzagate became a sickening, disgusting topic on the news and drew a lot of public attention, he scrubbed those entries -- but a diligent search of the Wayback Machine shows snapshots of the Infowars site when those posts were made.

A small victory for truth. (Loved Rocky & Bullwinkle!)