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New Web Site Makes Internet Time Traveling Easier

Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education (11-17-09)

Time traveling is coming to an Internet browser near you.

A new Web site called Memento Web will allow anyone curious about what the Internet used to look like to plug in a date and then browse the World Wide Web as it was on that day.

The site is already live with limited use. Users can enter a URL and the date on which they wish to see a version of the page the URL once called up.

That doesn't mean they'll get exactly what they were looking for. For example, a search for nytimes.com on November 17, 2006, returned a Web page dated December 8, 2007. Some searches don't work at all.

People behind the site, financed by a grant from the Library of Congress, said that they were still working on it and that they hoped to get more money to develop it further.

Michael Nelson, an associate professor in computer science at Old Dominion University, leads one of the teams behind the project. He said the tool made it easier to see Web sites that have been archived already by organizations such as Internet Archive or by sites like Wikipedia.

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 10:50 PM | Comments (0) | Return

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