Where to find your web archives

Archived content is available to view in Wayback 24 hours after a production crawl finishes or a test crawl is saved, and indexed for full text search 7 days after a production crawl is finished or a test crawl is saved. You can access your web archives, be they public or private, at any time from within our web application. To do so, begin by navigating to the "Archives" section of your account:

From this section of the web application, you can browse your archives in Wayback or search them by text, guidance for both of which are included below.

How to browse your archives in Wayback

By default, the "Archives" section of our web application opens to a "Wayback" tab from which you can search for a specific URL or else browse among seed URLs to open in Wayback.

To launch any archived page from your collections in Wayback, type its URL into the search bar, select the collection for which it was archived, and click the "Go" button. This will take you to the Wayback calendar page for the specified URL, from which you can choose the archive date that you wish to view.

To browse your archives from a particular seed site, select the relevant collection from the "Show Wayback Seeds for a Collection" drop-down menu, and then click on the URL for the seed that you wish to view. This will take you to the Wayback calendar page for the specified seed URL, from which you can choose the archive date that you wish to view.

How to search your archives

7 days after a production crawl finishes or a test crawl is saved, the content from that crawl will be indexed for full text search. To search for words or phrases in the content of your web archives, begin by navigating to the "Search" tab of the "Archives" section of our web application. Type the word or phrase into the search bar, select the collection from which you prefer to retrieve results (or do not select a specific collection if you prefer to search across all of them), and click the "Search" button:

Search results will appear below. By default, one result will show for each host archived within your collection(s). However, you can click the "Show all results for this host" link at the bottom of each search result in order to retrieve more results from each host.

Click on the hyperlinked title of any of these search results in order to launch the archived page on which your text appears in Wayback.

Advanced search

You can use the "Advanced Search" functionalities in this section of the web application in order to perform a more granular search of your web archives. To do so, simply enter the word or phrase into the search bar as you would above, then click the "Advanced Search" link below it. The resulting interface will enable you to limit your search to one or more collections, to include or exclude certain results by other text that they may contain, to limit the number of documents returned for each host with the matching language, to limit the precise file types (such as HTML, PDF, or Microsoft Word document) that appear in your results, and/or restrict the date range for your results.

Press the "Search" button and your search results will appear below, again enabling you to launch Wayback views of the relevant archived pages and/or browse among more results from a particular host site.