The internet remembers everything – so they say. In fact the web is more like a river and we all sit on a wooden platform that drifts with the current. We see what happens today and what had happened in the not-so-distant past, whereas older things often become swamped under torrents of content, or even lost forever. That’s where the Internet Archive, aka the Wayback Machine comes into play. Of course you can go to its web site and manually roll back time to see how a web page used to look before, but we’ve got a tool that does it better. Timefind is a NodeJS-based utility that automates Web Archive searches in such a way that you can quickly find out the first and the last appearance of a word or a phrase.
Timefind flips through saved snapshots of the web site you choose and searches for valid occurrences of the string provided. To install the application make sure you have NodeJS set up and then fire up this command: