Today we updated the Wayback Machine with much more data and some code improvements. Now we cover from late 1996 to December 9, 2012 so you can surf the web as it was up until a month ago. Also, we have gone from having 150,000,000,000 URLs to having 240,000,000,000 URLs, a total of about 5 petabytes of data. (Want a humorous description of a petabyte? start at 28:55) This database is queried over 1,000 times a second by over 500,000 people a day helping make archive.org the 250th most popular website.

Over the past year we archived tons of pages about the United States 2012 presidential election. You can revisit the New York Times live coverage page from election day, the campaign sites of Republican hopefuls like Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul, and mini-scandals like Romney’s car elevator or using aspirin as contraceptives. The Wayback record of the 2008 election was recently used by the Sunlight Foundation to contrast how Obama’s team dealt with disclosing inauguration donors then vs. now, so hopefully the 2012 election content will prove just as useful in the future.

The prolific volunteers of Archive Team spent a lot of time this year archiving web sites on the verge of disappearing and then contributing those records to Internet Archive. City of Heroes (including the boards with years of posts), Fortune City and Splinder were all saved from the proverbial wood chipper.

The updated version does have at least one known issue – there is a small amount of older content missing from the index, and it will take us another month or two to sort out that problem. In the mean time, you can still visit the previous version of the Wayback with that content.

We would like to thank the following for all their efforts in making the updated Wayback Machine:

Andy Bezella

Aaron Binns

Hank Bromley

Kris Carpenter

Dominic Dela Cruz

Vinay Goel

Jake Johnson

Brewster Kahle

Jeff Kaplan

Ilya Kreymer

Raj Kumar

John Lekashman

Noah Levitt

Adam Miller

Gordon Mohr

Ralf Muehlen

Kenji Nagahashi

Alexis Rossi

Jim Shankland

Sam Stoller

Brad Tofel

Travis Wellman