With its help, specialists of various profiles dbtodata will be able to find out: what the site looked like at different times; what themes the online project had at different times; what is the history of the domain and how many owners have changed; whether the web resource was subject to penalties. Hopefully, we've convinced you of the importance of website history, so our next step is to learn how to extract the data you need. How do web archives work? Almost immediately after the number of websites grew, the idea of preserving them for history arose — and so the web archive appeared. For example, the largest of them — Internet Archive — was founded in 1996, and the saved content became available since 2001.
One of the main principles of the creators is the idea of "fighting disappearing links." In essence, a web archive is the largest database that records the state of websites at a certain point in time. That is, special web scanners “visit” Internet pages from time to time, create copies of them and save them in their archive. Such a copy (or “cast”) is tied to a specific date. If a user is interested in the idea of looking at a website archive, he can use special services to see what the resource looked like on a specific day and track how it has changed over time. For example, the popular Wikipedia website, founded in January 2001, had only 6,000 articles in July of that year and looked like this: web archive of sites However, if the creators restrict access to archiving, copies of the pages may not be saved.
