See whether a website exists in the archives#

Ever since the first website was born, the worldwide web has seen many sites being created every day. Sometimes, websites die. However, if the Internet Archive crawled and stored a dead website when the website was still available, you can still access that website.

This tutorial shows you how to see if a website was crawled and stored by the Internet Archive.

API used#

Wayback machine APIs

Prerequisites#

The instructions in this tutorial use the cURL command. Most computers have this protocol pre-installed. To see if it’s installed on your computer, at the command prompt, run the following command:

curl

You should get an output similar to this:

curl: try 'curl --help' for more information

If you don’t see this output, install cURL.

Steps#

Run a command in the following syntax:

curl -X GET "https://archive.org/wayback/available?url=<url>"

where <url> is the URL of the website you’re looking for.

The result is a JSON dictionary that has the following objects:

url: The URL you queried the API for
archived_snapshots.closest.status: An HTTP status code that tells you whether the URL is available
archived_snapshots.closest.available: Boolean, based on the value of the status key
archived_snapshots.closest.url: If the value of archived_snapshots.closest.available is true, the URL of the archived website
archived_snapshots.timestamp: The most recent time when the website was archived

Example request#

curl -X GET "https://archive.org/wayback/available?url=http://tc.eserver.org/"

Example response#

{
    "url": "http://tc.eserver.org/",
    "archived_snapshots": {
        "closest": {
            "status": "200",
            "available": true,
            "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20180427130634/https://tc.eserver.org/",
            "timestamp": "20180427130634"
        }
    }
}

What to do next#

These steps give you the most recent snapshot of the queried website. If you need to retrieve all snapshots of the website, see Compare two versions of a website.

See whether a website exists in the archives

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