As Congress and State governments continue to seek internet privacy regulations, and internet users are beholden to take assertive action on privacy, safety, and accuracy of content on the internet, businesses such as the Wayback Machine are working to preserve internet content.

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is a digital archive of public pages on the World Wide Web.

Internet Archive began its work of copying the internet in 1996, and in 2001 rolled out the Wayback Machine. The program is a 3-dimensional index, allowing public access to historical documents, using a unique feature that allows expansive searches, over multiple time periods, of hundreds of billions of links, and the ability to access, use and link to historical documents.

The average internet user may not need to use a service such as Wayback Machine in order to find what they need, but they can.

There are many available archives, especially in industry, such as Smithsonian Institute, Britannica or Library of Congress. There are also similar businesses such as WebCite that offer access to internet libraries.

No matter which archive is used or what information sought, one skill is universally required to get desired information. The key is in the search terms.

Freelance Writer Anthony Dejolde published an article, How to Google Like a Boss. Dejolde referenced basic and extensive search terms, such as: Use quotes (“) around a word for exact match results, use the dash (-) before a word to exclude it from search results, and use the tilde (~) before a term to include results with synonyms.

With the massive volume of information on the web, it is easy to underestimate the value of saving historical internet content as we do books. It is also easy to forget the value of a good search term for obtaining and verifying desired information and doing research, such as looking up and tracking solutions, in Congress and in the States, for regulating internet providers and securing internet privacy for all users.