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The Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) is a free digital archive of the World Wide Web, launched in 2001 by the non-profit . It crawls and stores snapshots of web pages over time, letting users “go back in time” to see how sites used to look and what content they hosted.
The project began in 1996 when computer scientist founded the non-profit Internet Archive in San Francisco. Kahle recognized that the average lifespan of a webpage was shockingly short—often just weeks—and envisioned a "universal access to all knowledge".
Federal Rule of Evidence 902(13) allows printouts from the Wayback Machine to be admissible in U.S. courts, provided a party offers a written declaration. Attorneys routinely use the archive to prove:
The Wayback Machine offers a range of features and uses, including:
Here is an overview of its key features, history, and functions: