Birdsong Information Services

February, 2008

The Wayback Machine, (http://www.archive.org/web/web.php) from the Internet Archive has some pretty cool ways to use it for business and general purposes. The Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/index.php) is building a digital library of Internet sites and has archived over 85 billion web pages to date starting from 1996. They also archive music, images, text and audio and have some impressive material archived. Although the Wayback Machine does not currently support keyword searching the site can be very useful to a business when they have a specific idea of what they are searching for in a product or competitor. Let us take a look at how I recently used this site.

Business Search Example
A client was looking for a product where the company no longer existed. They thought the product was good and wanted to review it to see if it could be manufactured again or contact the owner if contact information existed. The client knew the name of the company and the website. In the take me back search area on the Wayback Machine we typed in the URL for the company and were able to view several years worth or products, with some product specifications and other useful information. The Wayback Machine can be used in many ways once you take a look at the site and see what type of information is available.

General Search Example
I put it to use with some cycling wheel sets I wanted to sell on eBay. The problem was I did not know the exact year and there was a critical change in the rear hub around the time I purchased them that a buyer might want to know about before purchasing them. Did I get them in 2003 or 2004? They were from Zipp so in the take me back area I typed in zipp.com and found the exact year that I purchased them by looking at the products in 2003 and 2004. I matched up what I could view at home with my wheel sets, the product description and the images on the website from 2003. I was also able to use the description on the 2003 website for my product description on eBay in 2008. Pretty cool and big thanks go to the folks from Internet Archive and all their supporters.

Should you need assistance with information
or research please contact me at

or 303-884-8666