Footprinting via Internet Archives

To know how to collect information using internet archives, we should first know what is an internet archive. So, let us first understand the term 'Internet Archives'. The Internet Archives is a digital archive of all the websites. It includes the date and time when the archive was updated. Also it contains the view of the page which was modified or uploaded. The Internet Archive allows the public to upload and download digital material to its data cluster, but the bulk of its data is collected automatically by its web crawlers, which work to preserve as much of the public web as possible. Its web archive, the Wayback Machine, contains over 150 billion web captures. The Archive also oversees one of the world's largest book digitization projects.

The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web and other information on the Internet created by the Internet Archive. Since 1996, the Wayback Machine has been archiving cached pages of websites onto its large cluster of Linux nodes. It revisits sites every few weeks or months and archives a new version. Sites can also be captured on the fly by visitors who enter the site's URL into a search box. The intention is to capture and archive content that otherwise would be lost whenever a site is changed or closed down. The overall vision of the machine's creators is to archive the entire Internet.

A few questions like :

• How to spy on a website?
• How to get site contents without register/login?
• How to view old contents of a site?
• How to see the contents deleted by admin of a site?
• How to see the frequency of uploads of a website?

Here, you will find answers to all these questions.

How to use WayBack Machine?

1. Visit   :-   https://archive.org/ 
2. You will see the search bar beside the text "WayBack Machine".
3. Just enter the URL in the search bar and you will see the calendar wise list of webpages captured on that site. (See the pic above, click on it to view in full size)
4. Just click on any date on the calendar and you will be redirected to the version of website at that time.

Why to use WayBack Machine?

• View Site Changes - This one is pretty obvious since it’s what everyone tends to use the Wayback Machine for, but it’s still worth mentioning some use cases. The Wayback Machine’s snapshots can be used to compare a site’s rendered appearance on different dates to see when some aspect of it was changed. This can be helpful when trying to determine the cause of a drop in a page’s rankings. Looking at the page in the time around the drop will help you determine what changes were made that may have negatively affected rankings. Use that intel to build a plan to fix the problem.
• Familiarize Yourself with a Site - When you get a new client, it’s important to become familiar with their site and get a feel of the ins and outs of their brand. The Wayback Machine allows you to do just that! You can see how the site has changed over the years, and you can even get a sense of what their brand voice was and how it may have changed. For those working on branding and content initiatives, this is very useful.
• Find Old Webpages - Sometimes, it happens that the admin of a website might have removed a page due to some reason. But the removed data might be of some use to you. You may have a need to that data but the admin has removed it. Here, WayBack Machine comes to a great help. It helps you to see the old data on websites.
• Discover Old URL Structures -
  Sometimes a website’s URL structure gets changed and the old structure is forgotten over time, which can cause problems when it comes to pulling data. If you have a general idea of when the structure was changed, you can use the Wayback Machine to find exactly when the change occurred and what the old structure used to be. Then you can and map out the newer URLs with their older counterparts. This can also be a great help if a site’s content has been reorganized or its subfolder names have been changed.
• Examine Robots.txt - The Wayback Machine indexes pretty much everything it finds on a site, including robots.txt files. This is great because if your site is having technical or crawlability issues, you can find the date or range where the changes causing those issues were made to robots.txt. All you have to do is search the Wayback Machine for a site’s robots.txt and compare snapshots around the time the problem started occurring until you find the culprit. We’ve had this happen recently when an enterprise client was getting “blocked resource” alerts in Google Search Console, but everything looked fine in the robots.txt. A little detective work with the Wayback Machine and we found that the robots.txt had been changed, and reverted back without documentation.
• Validate Analytics Code Placement and Use - The Wayback Machine indexes the source code for pages as well, so you can view and retrieve old code from previous pages. This is good for looking at past analytics code placement and use on a site if you’ve been noticing some unusual numbers in your analytics account. Depending on how the site was coded, this process could be used for event tracking as well.