The Internet Archive announced that the Wayback Machine, a huge internet archive of web pages dating back to 1996, has surpassed 400 billion pages indexed.
If you’ve been using Wayback since it debuted, you probably remember that the lag time for material (new pages and updates) to become accessible used to be six months or longer.
However, in the past couple of years this has also dramatically improved.
In Fall 2012, the Wayback Machine introduced a new feature that allows any user to archive any publicly accessible webpage or PDF that can be crawled on-demand.
The Wayback Machine: Your Own Web Archiver
Basically, simply cut and paste the URL of a web page or PDF and the Wayback crawler will archive and index the material and provide you with a direct url to it in real-time.
Open website https://cachedviews.com/
You’ll find a box URL to paste the URL into on the homepage. It’s labeled “Save Your Page to Archive.org”
Once the crawling and indexing is complete, a URL to the archived copy will either be provided in a pop-up box or — if archiving a PDF file — it will be found in the location bar.
There is no cost to use this feature and with it you can be assured the page/PDF you saw is available at a later date. At the same time, you’ve also helped make the Wayback Machine more comprehensive from all users.
By the way, the massive crawling of web material that has built a database of more than 440 billion pages continues. This new on-demand feature is in addition to the regular crawl. (Of course, pages and sites that are password protected, blocked by Robots.txt, etc. are not crawled.)