WHAT CAN I FIND IN THE WAYBACK MACHINE?
The Wayback Machine is the Luxembourg Web Archive’s search engine and playback tool. It will find the archived websites you are looking for in the archive, and show you the different versions in chronological order.
WHAT DO THE DIFFERENT DATES MEAN?
Since we operate regular crawls of most websites in our archive, we are able to download those websites over and over again, producing exact copies of the website as it appeared on the live web at the moment of capture. For some sites it might be sufficient to harvest one capture every 6 months, for others we try to determine a rhythm that is better suited to the rapid changes of information on the Internet.
CAN I SEARCH FOR WEBSITES IN THE WAYBACK MACHINE?
Unfortunately there is no full text search, as we know it from Google, Bing or other search engines on the Internet. The search engine is not able to produce results by simple terms, phrases or questions.
At the moment, we are only able to look up pages by typing the address in the search bar.
However, it is not necessary to type “www.”, or “http://” in front of the address, you only need the domain name and TLD (top level domain), such as “.lu”, “.com”, or “.org”.
E.g. you can type “bnl.lu” into the search bar, without adding “http://www.bnl.lu”, but simply typing “bnl” will not work.
CAN I LOOK AT AN ARCHIVED WEBSITE FROM THE LWA AT HOME?
Unfortunately this is not possible due to copyright reasons. The Luxembourg Web Archive is only allowed to give access to the archive from within the National Library of Luxembourg. This principle is applied by almost all web archives collected by national libraries around the world.
CAN I SAVE THE LINK FROM THE WAYBACK MACHINE AND USE IT AT HOME?
No, this link will not work outside the National library. However, it is possible that the Internet Archive might have the same or similar capture of the website you were interested in. Check out their website under archive.org, to see what you can find in their collections. The URLs from their Wayback Machine can also be used to reference a webpage or article.
WHAT CAN I FIND IN THE WAYBACK MACHINE?
The Wayback Machine is the Luxembourg Web Archive’s search engine and playback tool. It will find the archived websites you are looking for in the archive, and show you the different versions in chronological order.
WHY IS THE WEBSITE I’M LOOKING FOR NOT IN THE ARCHIVE?
As a component of the digital legal deposit, harvesting the web ensures the long term access to the public contents of the Internet. Overall, the LWA operates in an inclusive, rather than exclusive collection policy, in the sense that the legal deposit applies to Luxembourg publishers, which the BnL interprets as:
– All sites from the “.lu” top level domain (TLD)
– Sites published in Luxembourg
– Sites created by Luxembourgish people
The legal deposit mandate does however not translate to an obligation of completeness, due to the extent and feasibility of these tasks.
WHY ARE SOME ELEMENTS MISSING OR BROKEN IN THE ARCHIVED VERSION OF A WEBSITE?
There could be Robots.txt exclusions, which forbid our crawler to run over certain elements or even entire pages. In general we respect these barriers set up by site owners, since they often serve to prevent the website from crashing if there was too much traffic.
Javascript elements are difficult to archive, since they often depend on contacting a server in order to work, this connection will not work for the archived website.
In general, any dynamic or user interaction related content is difficult to archive and simple html is the easiest to archive.
WHY DO YOU ONLY GO BACK TO 2016? DO YOU HAVE OLDER VERSIONS OF WEBSITES?
Even though the legal deposit law enabled the BnL to archieve websites in 2009, we were only able to launch the program in 2016, due to a lack of funding and personnel. It is certain that much has been lost since the early days of the web, which is a general issue for web archives all around the world, and many countries are still working on launching web archiving initiatives on a national level.
CAN I ADD MY WEBSITE TO THE ARCHIVE?
Yes, please send us all kinds of requests and suggestions. We rely on the participation and input from creators, website owners, archive users, researchers and generally everyone interested in keeping information on the web accessible.
You can contact us here: