What are you actually looking at?
The Wayback Machine is a way to examine saved versions of a web address. Think of it as a shelf of surviving observations: a page captured on one date may look very different from the same address captured years later. It is especially useful when you already have an address and want to investigate what used to be there. The calendar gives you available captures, not a continuous recording of everything that happened.
Your first excavation
Choose a website you remember well. Enter its original address, pick an available year, and open a capture. Then compare it with another date. Our suggestion: look beyond the logo. Read the navigation labels, the introduction, and the links the site considered important. Keep a short note of what changed and what stayed surprisingly familiar.
A missing picture is part of the evidence
Pages depend on images, styles, scripts, and other resources that may not have been captured together. A broken interaction does not prove the original website was broken. Links can also move you into another capture date. Watch the archive timestamp as you explore and avoid treating a whole browsing session as one perfectly preserved moment.
Save a useful trail
For every find, record the original URL, the archive URL, the capture date, and your own viewing date. Separate what you can see from what you infer. “This capture shows a store link” is stronger than guessing when the company first started selling products. Save Page Now can capture an individual page, but it is not a complete website backup or a promise of future captures.
Department assignment
Find two versions of one homepage and write three observations: what the owner wanted visitors to do, how the page made that action obvious, and one detail you would bring back today. Bonus points for a guestbook. No extra credit for clicking a missing guestbook forty times.