See whether a website exists in the archives
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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#
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 forarchived_snapshots.closest.status
: An HTTP status code that tells you whether the URL is availablearchived_snapshots.closest.available
: Boolean, based on the value of thestatus
keyarchived_snapshots.closest.url
: If the value ofarchived_snapshots.closest.available
istrue
, the URL of the archived websitearchived_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.