Google and Wayback Machine team up to make accessing old websites a ton easier

Whether you want a history of a website for research purposes or you just really want to see what your favorite websites looked like during the 2000s, the Wayback Machine is a really handy tool for finding saved snapshots of what the internet looked like. And while it wasn’t difficult to use whatsoever, a new update has made it even easier than ever before. Now, when you search online using Google, you can select the option to bring up the Wayback Machine through the search engine and get access to its history in just a few clicks.

Google adds Wayback Machine support to its search results

As announced on the Internet Archive Blogs, you can now fetch Wayback Machine results from a Google search through each result. Doing so is super easy:

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.

Once you select the Wayback Machine shortcut, you’ll see a range of snapshots of the website. You can now peruse them to see when a specific change happened, or just whack it all the way back to the oldest snapshot and see what the website looked like in its early years.

If this has gotten you interested in the history of how the internet evolved into what we see today, check out how Google went from a simple webpage to an ubiquitous internet giant in 23 years. Or perhaps you remember one of these 8 web browsers you forgot about, but shouldn’t have.