Google Search

Google will now link to The Internet Archive to add more context to Search results

Ben Schoon | Sep 11 2024 - 8:20 am PT

Rolling out starting today, Google Search results will now directly link to The Internet Archive to add historical context for the links in your results.

Google Search makes it easy to find information, but occasionally you need historical context for a page that may have been recently updated. That was previously possible to a certain extent through cached pages in Search, but that functionality was removed earlier this year.

Starting today, though, Google Search will make it possible to see a whole lot more historical context for a link.

Google has partnered with The Internet Archive, a non-profit research library that, in part, stores and preserves massive portions of the web to be easily referenced later. This is done through the “Wayback Machine” which can show a website or specific page as it existed on a previous date.

Through this new partnership, Google will link directly to The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for pages that you find in Search.

Google says in a statement to 9to5Google:

We know that many people, including those in the research community, value being able to see previous versions of webpages when available. That’s why we’ve added links to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to our ‘About this page’ feature, to give people quick context and make this helpful information easily accessible through Search.

In a post regarding the announcement, The Internet Archive celebrates that these results are now “just a click away” in Google Search and adds that this partnership “underscores the importance of web archiving.”

To access The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine links through Google Search you’ll need to click the three-dots menu button that appears alongside all search results and then tap on “More about this page.”

This new feature is still actively rolling out, but Google was able to provide an image to show what the integration looks like.