#wassup — Public Fediverse posts

Today’s #WASSUP tip: a search shortcut for looking up pages in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Ever click on a link for an article or photo and it’s not found (404), or redirects to a home page, or otherwise is not what you expect?

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine archives webpages (that allow it) and quite often you can lookup broken links in the archive.

I often do this by typing "https://web.archive.org/web/" into the browser address bar and then pasting the link I want to lookup, because I know some of the Internet Archive’s URL patterns.

Though it’s not really a “search engine”, I realized I could use the search engine shortcuts feature of Firefox to simplify this greatly.

Here’s how to create a search shortcut for the Internet Archive Wayback Machine:

1. open Firefox Preferences ("Firefox" menu, "Preferences" item)
2. select "🔍 Search" from the left column
3. click the [ + Add search engine ] button
4. enter "Internet Archive" into the Search engine name field (without quotes)
5. enter "https://web.archive.org/web/%s" into the URL field (without quotes)
6. enter "ia" into the Keyword field (without quotes)

Now if a link I follow fails to load (404) or is otherwise broken, I can:

1. copy that link (I may have to go back to the previous page and right-click choose "Copy Link")
2. activate the browser address bar (cmd-L does this in Firefox and Safari)
3. type "ia " (without the quotes)
4. paste the link I had copied earlier, and press return

Presto, an Internet Archive result for that link.

If you’re a frequent user of the Wayback Machine, hopefully this will save you some time.

And if not, try it anyway for the next time you click on a link and it seems broken.

This is my fifth #WASSUP #WASSUP2026 post, and third useful web tip for September.

#InternArchive #WaybackMachine #search #searchShortcut #Firefox #FirefoxSearch #searchEngine #archive #archives #PageNotFound #404 #404Error #Error404 #tip #webTip #browserTip #webBrowserTip #searchTip