Web archive.
Have you ever wondered that what happens to your deleted posts on social media? Well, deletion of data is a big topic for itself. Some social media companies claims that they keep your data for certain period of time and delete them permanently. But, no one knows what happens behind the screens. In this blog we’ll not engage in those mind boggling debates, rather we’ll focus on how can we archive certain things on web(hmm…most of the things).
Wayback Machine — Internet Archive is not a new thing for internet enthusiasts out there. Generally what it does is, it archives most of the things which is uploaded on the internet. This service is active for more than 20 years, so could imagine the amount of data that it has archived so far! Let’s say I want to fetch some details about the tweets made by Edward Snowden, how could I do that? Just copy the url of his account and feed that to the Wayback Machine!
Wow! As you can see from the above screenshots, I was able to pull lot of information about an account(in our case Ed Snowden) which is all public.
If you want to extract all the tweets made by Snowden, just add a wild card character(*) at the end of the url.
On archive.is, you’ll get to see similar features as in the Wayback Machine, but with some minor changes. Let’s take the same example of Snowden and see what results that we can obtain.
As you can see, we got a bit more pictorial representation of the tweets made by Mr.Snowden.
Both of these services are free to use, you can also save individual web pages of your concern, and keep a record of them.
Another best option is cachedpages.com, according to their website, “Checking a cached version of a page instead of the current live version is useful if the original page is unreachable due to an Internet congestion or if the website is down, overloaded or slow, or simply if the web page has been removed by the site owner.” . So if you looking for a quick retrieval of information, cached pages can be super useful.
Cachedview.com provides rich interface and some extra features, such as sort list alphabetically & Online Chinese input method which I found quite useful.
It is noteworthy to mention that Google keeps an(pretty much all the things on the internet…..)archive of famous news papers all around the world. It could be beneficial for journalists, fact checkers or the common citizenry in that matter, to get access to old archives of newspapers.
