# Wayback Machine 57 Hacker News commenters recommended Wayback Machine and 31 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 13 months. **Verdict:** People recommend it as a free library of the web that preserves pages, including dead sites, that would otherwise be lost. Critics say it is slow, rate-limits heavily, and sometimes removes content. ## Why people recommend it - Preserves dead and deleted websites (6 comments): "Huge chunks of the Web have been displaced or snuffed by social media and gen AI, making Wayback a unique(ly valuable) source of information and history" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49594144)) "the Internet Archive is one of the few parts of the Internet which do not precisely suck" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48471296)) "it's all thanks to the Internet Archive storing my little gaming review website" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49719893)) - Free, valuable historical archive (5 comments): "They provide an incredibly valuable service and I love the benefit that I get from them just for personal side projects." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49720515)) "there is so much cool stuff in the archive. It really is the library of the internet, and I love it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49726776)) "even though those things are incredible and a massive part of its value to humanity" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46742372)) - Useful for verifying past page versions (3 comments): "The Wayback Machine has saved me more than once trying to verify what a platform's published API behaviour was supposed to be" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47018137)) "If you view the page on the Internet Archive all the links point to archived copies" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47920778)) "Wayback machine URLs are much more likely to be stable." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47019176)) - Stable links to archived content (5 comments): "consider also pointing towards (or at least creating) an archived version via something like the Wayback Machine" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50173838)) "Please use one of the standard archive.today sites or wayback machine to offer mirrors." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48973905)) "ask them to make a GET or POST to https://web.archive.org/save whenever a link is added" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47093985)) ## What people warn about - Slow, timeouts and rate limits (4 comments): "Archive.org is co-operative, it respects robots.txt and allows deletion. It's also very slow." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49724701)) "wayback has been serving me nothing but some mix of timeouts, 429 errors, and "Temporarily Offline" messages for weeks" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49594299)) "the IA itself has become way less usable as their aggressive anti-bot protection means that actually doing any kind of (manual) explorative research" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48233718)) - Removes content on request (4 comments): "ofc this is a risk with the Wayback Machine, who also has a policy for honoring takedown request." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50276968)) "removes content they deem 'problematic' even if not illegal or requested by the site owner" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49720047)) "You can just request content be removed from Archive.org and they will honor this" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47098659)) - Archived pages can run altered scripts (2 comments): "Archive.org snapshots may load javascript from external sites, where the original page had loaded them. That script can change anything on the page." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47096013)) "It lets archives be altered by page JS and deleted by the page domain owner." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47093991)) - Search and rendering often fail (3 comments): "The Wayback Machine has a ton of snapshots of the Twitter post but none of them render for me." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46628446)) "Trying to search the Wayback machine almost always gives me their made-up 498 error" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47094128)) "we can't search through time via WayBack Machine where a lot of these things have gone" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48259851)) ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://web.archive.org/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Wayback Machine", https://hackerapproved.com/p/wayback-machine/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).