Web site takes you way back in Internet history

Ever dream of floating back in time to the good old days of the Internet, when Amazon.com was just a tiny little online bookstore and WebCrawler was the best search engine around?

Well, if you are feeling a bit nostalgic for 1996, it may be time to take a magical ride on The Wayback Machine.

A digital time travel device of sorts, The Wayback Machine allows history buffs, journalists, social anthropologists, researchers and curious Web surfers to scroll the annals of Internet history by pulling up forgotten Web pages.

Want to see Google's first Web site?

Check out Microsoft's home page from October 1996?

Or see Al Gore's Web site from the 2000 election?

It's all right at your fingertips in The Wayback Machine, web.archive.org/

In fact, The Wayback Machine is the largest known database in the world, with about 10 billion archived Web pages taking up 100 terabytes of data. That's enough information to put stresses and strains on the 300 computer servers powering the digital archive.

Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat -- founders of the Amazon.com subsidiary Alexa Internet -- created the concept behind The Wayback Machine in 1996, compiling millions of Web sites for their Internet navigation service. Instead of discarding the old Web properties like other search engines, Kahle and Gilliat stored them in a digital library for a non-profit San Francisco organization known as The Internet Archive.

The digital library grew and grew and grew. But few people knew about it.

Information was kept on digital tape for five years, with Kahle occasionally allowing researchers and scientists to tap into the clunky database.

But when the archive hit its five-year anniversary earlier this year, Kahle and the rest of the team decided to open it to the public. In a ceremony last week at the University of California-Berkeley, The Wayback Machine was unveiled.

Now, for the first time in five years, all of the information is available free to the public.

For those who followed the birth of the Internet, The Wayback Machine is kind of like opening King Tut's tomb for the first time. It's a virtual treasure trove of information.

So far, it has been a smashing success, with more than 1 million visitors per day.

"People love to see their old Web sites. They are just thrilled to see the old pictures that they thought were long gone," Kahle said. "And they are psyched about becoming a part of history."

With a good memory of Web-site addresses and a quick click of the "Take Me Back!" button, one can spend hours exploring the darkest corners of cyberspace.

I checked out one of Amazon.com's early home pages, a primitive site that showed a grainy looking logo that boasted "Earth's biggest bookstore." Comparing it with Amazon.com's site today -- with its multiple tabs, consumer reviews and colorful graphics -- shows just how far e-commerce has progressed in five years.

I also explored Web sites of Seattle companies that are no longer with us such as HomeGrocer.com, Mercata, Rivals.com and FizzyLab. After typing in the names and waiting a few seconds, they all popped up.

In many cases, the links within the Web sites even worked -- allowing deeper exploration of news releases, management teams and investors.

Hidden gems are found all over.

For example, check out this message from HomeGrocer.com dated Nov. 16, 1999:

"What if you didn't have to go to the grocery store? What if a truck drove up to your door, and a nice driver put the groceries on your kitchen counter? What if the groceries didn't cost more, and they were as good as or better than what you normally buy? Too good to be true? Well, we'll give you a 100 percent satisfaction money-back guarantee."

But The Wayback Machine doesn't always work. When I typed in MyLackey.com, the Seattle online errand service that went out of business last year, it returned 89 different Web pages from Jan. 25, 1998, to May 31, 2001. But none of them produced the familiar orange and blue Web site with Mr. Lackey wearing his top hat. A message appeared saying the Web site I requested was not in the archive, but it would be added to a list.

Still, at 10 billion Web pages -- a database that Kahle says is bigger than those operated by Wal-Mart and American Express -- you can find some very interesting things.

In addition to the search function, The Wayback Machine has four special collections: Election 2000, United States Government, Web Pioneers and September 11th.

Still in its early stages, Kahle says he hopes The Wayback Machine can be a useful research tool.

Kahle recalls a Wall Street Journal reporter who contacted him a few years ago to find out exactly when Microsoft changed strategies and decided to make the giant leap into the Internet business.

"He wanted the evidence," Kahle remembered. "But I couldn't provide it because we didn't have a Wayback Machine."

Now, he said, a reporter or researcher could jump on site, type in the Microsoft URL and search through early versions of the company's Web site for evidence.

And that, Kahle said, is a valuable tool.

"Society needs objective views of the past," Kahle said. "The Web ... is becoming an important part of our information ecology."

The Wayback Machine, which takes its name from an imaginary device in the 1960s cartoon "The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle," is backed by AT&T; Research, Compaq Computer, Xerox PARC, the Library of Congress, the National Science Foundation and others.