Our favourite websites and online platform days are dynamic and updates due to time. Thus, the web UI, information and functionality of the site keeps changing. Though most old sites keep changing and survive, many websites are down and not available now. What if you want to visit ancient sites which are currently not available? How do you do that?
Fortunately, quite a few services grant us the ability to time travel back into the past to view old sites. Services such as Google and Wayback Machine crawl through websites, take a snapshot of the web page and save it to their server.
Later, they provide public access to the cached website, thus enabling anyone to visit a cached web page. This article will discuss the prominent web services that will help you to access cached websites. Also, we will mention how to use each of these cached websites services briefly.
You would want to know all of it because it will come in very handy when you visit the site, but the server is down. You can use cached websites services to access the website back in time and take on the valuable information from the site.
View Google Cached Websites
Though Google provides numerous web services, they are well known for their web search engine. Google has the finest databases of websites, and they cache every site.
To access cached sites on google, firstly, you will have to search for the website. Thus, this feature is very handy when you want to visit the server is down. Therefore, open the web browser and head over to google. Most web browsers have google as their default web search engine, so click on the URL bar of your web browser and type whatever you want to search.
From the search result, click on the three dots beside the website link. If you are using an Android or iOS device, ensure that Desktop Site is active in your web browser settings. A prompt will appear; there click on the Cached button below to view the cached web page.
Google will load the older version of the site shortly, and you will have a few options to enable and disable. Such as the full-Text mode, which will view the website as only text, the View Source option. Along with the date, Google will show you when Google took the snapshot of the web page.
Alternatively, if you know the URL of the site, you want to view the cached web page. Then you can directly add cache: before the URL, and Google will open the snapshot of the web page. For example, if you want to see the cached version of the StudyTonight website, the URL should follow.
cache:studytonight.com
View Cached Websites in Wayback Machine
Wayback Machine is an Internet Archiver that has been saving countless websites & webpages for decades. They are a nonprofit firm, so they provide free access to the old web pages and sites. Along with websites, they also host texts, videos, audios, images and softwares that can be no longer found today from a regular google search.
To start using Wayback MAchine from Internet Archive, open your web browser and visit https://archive.org/web/, its Wayback Machine official site. In the Wayback Machine web page, type or paste the URL of the website in the text field and click on the Browse History button to visit the cached version of the website.
Wayback machine is different from google because it also saves websites which no longer exists. Along with that, the Wayback machine provides categories such as Books, Videos, Audio and Softwares.
Thus, you don't necessarily need an URL of a website to search for a cached version of a web page in Wayback Machine. On the home page of the Wayback Machine, click on the icons at the top to look for books, audio, videos, images,softwares.
View Cached Web Pages From Archive. Today
Archive. Today is a similar service regarding Wayback Machine, however Archive. Today doesn't provide any categories to look from.
To start using Archive. Today to view cached websites, firstly open your web browser and visit Archive. Today homepage https://archive.ph/. On the web page, type the quey below the I want to search the Archive for saved snapshots label and click on the search button to view the result. From the search result, click on the link to the cached web page.
If you have a website and want to archive it, you can do so by typing or pasting the URL of your website in the text field under the My URL is alive, and I want to archive its content label and click on the Save button.
Archive. Today also provides a chrome extension; hence, you can install the Archive using a Chrome-based browser.Today Chrome extension and use the extension on any site you want to view its cached image.
However, other web extensions, such as Web Cache Viewer, are available on the chrome extension and firefox plugin stores. You can install these plugins for free, and while utilizing the extension, you can load the current web page cached version.
Conclusion
Overall, cached websites are the snapshots of web pages that various services are taking for decades. Google allows users to visit the cached version of the website from the web search. Wayback Machine provides you with web pages and contents that no longer exists on today's modern web.
Services such as Archive. Today lets users cache their websites, which you can later access via Archive—today's query search. Lastly, you can install a web browser extension such as Web Cache Viewer to access the cache version of the current website you are on.
