Retro
Web Archives
Archives, dead websites brought back and search pointed at the past. What the web looked like before it settled down.
12 sites
Thousands of themed collections built by libraries and museums, each one somebody's deliberate decision about what to keep.
- 10 min
Takes a permanent snapshot of a page on demand, including ones the Wayback Machine will not capture. Useful when a page is about to change.
- 2 min
The Portuguese web archive, notable for full-text search across its whole history rather than only address lookup.
- 10 min
Petabytes of crawled web pages released free for anyone to analyse. Most of the language models you have used started here.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Records a page as you browse it, capturing the parts a crawler cannot — logged-in views, video, anything behind a click.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Archived research papers, including preprints and journals that have since folded, kept readable rather than merely cited.
- 10 min
Thematic collections captured around elections, disasters and cultural moments, chosen by librarians rather than by a crawler.
- 10 min
Browses the archives through emulated period browsers, so an old page renders the way it did rather than the way Chrome guesses.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Curated collections around specific research subjects, preserved because a university decided they would matter later.
- 10 min
Nearly a trillion saved web pages. Paste any address, pick a year, and see what was there — the single most important archive online.
- 2 min
Australia's national archive of newspapers, websites and photographs, digitised back to 1803 and open without an account.
- 1 hr+
The British Library's record of the UK web, collected under legal deposit — including sites their owners deleted years ago.
- 10 min
How we picked these
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
Web Archives: questions
How many sites are in Web Archives?
12 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
11 of the 12 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
9 of 12 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 12 are safe for work and 12 work with the sound off.