Sometimes it's scary to look through a photo album and realise that you really did wear some of those weird fashions and hairstyles not-so-long-ago!
It can be just as interesting looking back through a "photo album" of old web pages.
Recently Google celebrated its tenth birthday by revealing the 2001 version of the Google search engine (www.google.com/search2001.html) –be quick to check it out as the site won’t be up for long. Technical issues prevented them from making the 1998 version available, but it’s still amazing to see how far the web has come in the last seven years. Click on a link in the results page and you’ll be taken to the current live version of that page, if it still exists. Look closely at the results and you’ll see a link to “View old version on the Internet Archive”.
The Internet Archive (www.archive.org) is a great way of looking at various web page fashions over the relatively brief history of the internet. From the Internet Archive homepage, type an internet address into the Wayback Machine search box and click the "Take me Back" button to search. If that web site has been archived, you will be presented with a list of dates when the site was "captured" for archiving. Click on a date to see that webpage as it looked in the late 1990's. Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) from 1996 certainly looks different to today's version. The archive isn't complete, and there are plenty of broken links and missing graphics, but it's a fun site to visit.
The Internet Archive also has a serious role preserving the wealth of social, intellectual and cultural information that appears and disappears all too quickly on the Internet. This function makes it a great search tool for web-based information that is several years old. For example, an ABC News page (www.abc.net.au) archived in August 1997, has breaking news stories of the Thredbo landslide disaster.
As well as regular web pages, the Wayback Machine has also archived audio and video files and it has a pretty good Advanced Search feature which is worth a look. Have fun searching the early days of the web.
Need help searching the web? Contact your local Citi library branch:
Citi Library Aitkenvale 4727 8312
Citi Library Flinders Mall 4727 9665
Citi Library Thuringowa 4773 8601 or infodesk@townsville.qld.gov.au
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Searchlight is a weekly column written by CityLibraries Townsville. It is published in the Townsville Bulletin newspaper and on this 'blog every Monday. Searchlight aims to make your internet searching more effective, efficient and fun by reviewing search tools, providing searching hints and tips, and helping with tricky search topics.
