OSINT-y Goodness, №19 — oldweb.today

In the vein of the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine, oldweb.today gives you the opportunity to view previous versions of websites.

This is a very simple website, brought to you by Rhizome.

Ta-da! That’s it. That’s basically the whole site.

As you can see from the screen capture above, you can choose which browser view you’d like, the ability to direct it to a specific URL, and the choice of a past date. Much like Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky,” you can just let the program give you a random site.

When I selected the “I’m Feeling Random!” option, this is what I got.

This “I’m Feeling Random!” selection was a bust.

If you can’t see the URL in that screen capture, it was for porno[.]com. How quaint. But, as you can also see, it’s an inactive website. So, nothing to see here — -thankfully.

It took me a few tries to get an old website to come up on oldweb.today.

The 2009 headlines don’t seem much different than today.

Finally, this combination of browser for a CNN page from 2009 yielded the result above.

The only other part of the site worth looking at is the “About/How it works” portion of the site.

Some back end information about the site.

This is useful back end information and links to other archives sites. Basically, if the search engine itself isn’t working for you, you at least have some other resources to different archives sites.

As I noted in the beginning, this is a very simplistic site. It didn’t work with 100% accuracy. However, the web archives links in their “About” portion of the site are useful.

Try it out as another way to grab old versions of websites.