Some notes from my regular use of the Wayback Machine.

I donated $100 to the Internet Archive in 2021.

URL format

https://web.archive.org/web/<date>/<url>

Dates

*

Displays the calendar, with all the available versions of a URL.

YYYY[MM[DD[HH[MM[SS]]]]]*

Displays the calendar at this particular year.

YYYY[MM[DD[HH[MM[SS]]]]]

Displays the version that is the closest to this date, along with the Wayback Machine header that allows switching to another version, always as an HTML page in UTF-8.

YYYY[MM[DD[HH[MM[SS]]]]][a-z]{2}_

Displays the version that is the closest to this date, but without the Wayback Machine’s header and with the original MIME type and encoding. Useful when the page was not encoded in UTF-8 as the normal version can have issues.

URL

If the URL ends with * and the date specifier is *, then a list of all URLs that start with this prefix is displayed. Otherwise, the Wayback Machine matches the URL exactly and might return a 404.