Google Search will take you ‘Wayback’ with links to the Internet Archive

Google Search is now adding links to archived websites in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. That’s a bit of good news for anybody lamenting the disappearance of the cached pages link from Google’s results.

The Internet Archive hosts billions of archived webpages, as it notes in its blog post today about the change. The Wayback Machine is a very helpful tool for looking at older versions of websites to see what may have changed compared to past versions, which, in some cases, can go back decades.

Google Search liaison Danny Sullivan wrote in February that he hoped to bring Internet Archive links into search results after the company deprecated cached results. With this blog post, it seems he’s now gotten his wish. Google also confirmed the change to 9to5Google.

You can get to the results by clicking the three dots next to a specific link in the results, then click “More about this page” to get to a link to the Wayback Machine page, the post says. I tested this and didn’t find any links to the Internet Archive’s digital backlog. Although the change is apparently rolling out today, it often takes some time before Google’s changes show up for everyone.