8 Wayback Machine Alternatives — and How to Search Them All at Once

When people say “check the archive”, they almost always mean the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. It deserves the reputation: it holds hundreds of billions of captures going back to 1996. But it misses pages, it is sometimes slow or rate-limited, and some sites ask it to hide their history. When that happens, a different archive very often has the copy you need.

Below are the seven public archives we rely on alongside the Wayback Machine, with what each is genuinely good at, how to look a page up, and the catches. All eight are free.

At a glance

1. Archive.today (archive.ph)

Archive.today saves a page when someone asks it to, rendering it in a real browser first. That makes it the best choice for pages that rely on JavaScript, pages behind soft paywalls and social posts that the Wayback crawler often captures as a blank shell. Each capture also gets a static screenshot, so even when the HTML is odd you can see what the page looked like.

• Look up: archive.ph/https://example.com/page lists every capture of that exact URL; archive.ph/*.example.com lists a whole site.
• Save: paste the URL on the home page and press save. It can take a minute when the queue is busy.
• Catch: coverage depends on what people chose to save, so obscure pages may have no copies at all. You will sometimes hit a CAPTCHA.

2. Arquivo.pt — the Portuguese Web Archive

Despite the name, Arquivo.pt preserves millions of sites worldwide and has captures back to 1996. Two things set it apart: a fast, tidy list of versions for any URL, and full-text search across archived pages — you can search for words, not just addresses, which almost no other archive offers publicly. It also supports the Memento protocol, so tools can query it programmatically.

Look up: arquivo.pt/url/search?q=https://example.com.

3. Archive-It

Archive-It is the Internet Archive's subscription service for libraries, universities, museums and governments. More than a thousand institutions use it to build focused collections — election sites, university domains, government publications, events. Those collections are crawled deliberately and often more frequently than the general crawl, so for institutional or government pages it can hold captures the Wayback Machine does not show.

Look up: wayback.archive-it.org/all/*/https://example.com searches all public collections at once.

4. Ghostarchive

Ghostarchive is a free on-demand archive with particularly good support for video pages and social media. If you need to preserve a post or a video page as it appeared, it is worth trying alongside Archive.today. It supports prefix and wildcard search.

Look up: ghostarchive.org/search?term=https://example.com.

5. UK Web Archive

Led by the British Library together with the other five UK legal-deposit libraries, the UK Web Archive has been collecting since 2004 and, since 2013, crawls the whole UK web domain under legal-deposit law. Much of it is viewable only in the reading rooms, but the openly licensed portion is searchable online and it is a strong source for .uk sites.

Look up: webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/*/https://example.co.uk.

6. Trove Web Archive (Australian Web Archive)

The National Library of Australia's archive, browsed through Trove, combines the PANDORA selective archive with large domain crawls. It is strongest on .au domains but crawls widely, and captures go back to 1996 — sometimes earlier than the Wayback Machine for Australian organisations.

Look up: webarchive.nla.gov.au/awa/*/https://example.com.au.

7. Common Crawl

Common Crawl is different: it is an open dataset rather than a browsing service. Every month it publishes billions of crawled pages as WARC files, with an index you can query by URL. It is aimed at developers and researchers — the index returns JSON, not a rendered page — but it is invaluable for large-scale analysis and as an independent record that a page existed.

Look up: query the newest index at index.commoncrawl.org with ?url=example.com/page&output=json.

How to search all eight at once

Each archive is good at different things, so the honest answer to “which one should I use?” is usually *all of them*. Doing that by hand is tedious: eight sites, eight URL formats, eight copies of the address. Web Archive Viewer turns it into one step.

1. 1

   Open the popup on any page

   Click the toolbar icon or press Alt+Shift+A. The current page's address is filled in.

2. 2

   Read one card per archive

   Each card shows whether that archive has the page, the capture count and the first-to-last date range, with Latest and Oldest buttons.

3. 3

   Open one — or press Search All

   Click a card to open that archive's own page for the URL, or use Search All to open every archive in background tabs.

Every link goes to the archive's own lookup page for that exact URL; the extension never guesses whether a snapshot exists — the archive tells you. You can reorder or hide archives in Settings so the ones you use most come first.

Which alternative should you try first?

If none of them has your page, the next step is recovery: checking URL variants, the site's other pages and the live server. Our guide to recovering a deleted web page covers that process.

FAQ