HTTP 404. Also known as “not found”, or (insert colorful insult here). The Web changes constantly, and pages that are available today could disappear tomorrow, but not if the Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive has something to say about it. With a simple search it’s easy to locate old copies of lost content, but the portal now offers a Chrome-compatible extension that does that work automatically.
Installation tutorials for old software, classic game guides, articles published in the dial-up modem era (the horror!)... it’s very likely that content is no longer directly available. Many domains and hosting services disappeared (a good example is GeoCities, although it remains active in Japan), which in turn extinguished millions of pages. Fortunately, there are many efforts dedicated to backing up both the old and new Web. A 404 error or some variant of the 500 errors don’t represent the end of the road, and that’s when the Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive comes to the rescue.
The problem is that its use is not very intuitive, to say the least, which leaves out a significant number of users. After several delays, the Internet Archive finally released a Chrome-compatible extension that redirects the main 400 and 500 errors to the Wayback Machine. The extension stays in the background and doesn’t interfere until a web address shows an error message. Wayback Machine always offers the most recent archived copy available. The bar at the top reports other captures, but sometimes they are false positives.
The Wayback Machine extension was published on January 12, which is quite striking because its Firefox counterpart has been available for much longer. Either way, we welcome it, since it saves us from manually visiting the official page, copying and pasting links, and searching for the best copy.
