The Way Back Machine on the Internet Archive (archive.org) now has a feature that helps you track how a website changed over time.

“Changes” is a tool you can use to identify, and display, changes in the content of archives of URLs. First you can select two different archives for a URL, based on an interface that shows the degree of relative change from one archive to another. Then you can see the replay of the two URLs you select, side-by-side, with changes highlighted in Blue and Yellow.

Here’s how it works…

Start with a basic search of a url, which gives you a results page that has a timeline showing different archives of the url like you see below.

But what’s new here is a Changes button in the middle.

Click on Changes and it pulls up grid calendars with a box for each day of the year.

See here below for every time the url was archived over the year 2022, each box represents one day when the url was archived. the color of the box tells you how much I’m the webpage changed compared to the last archive of the url. a grey box means nothing much changed, yellow means some change. green is more change and blue is even more.

You can choose to compare different versions of a webpage by hitting the compare button on the top and then choosing two different dates when it was archived.

Then you get a page like this pulling up both versions and you see the dates listed.

it lists how many archives exist over a time period, in this case 36 archives of “search-ish.com” from 2020 to 2023. And you can use the drop-down menus of dates over both sides to change which version is being viewed.

And the actual changes in the webpage are highlighted. below you see that on the right side archive there is new text added for in and that’s highlighted in blue to show you where there’s an addition in the page. (yellow means something was removed)

Twitter / X – Feature

Archive is also now archiving Tweets and this new website lets you searching specifically for archived tweets based Twitter handle. And it will also let you choose to specifically search for deleted tweets.

https://waybacktweets.streamlit.app/

that’s it!