🔍 Wayback Machine Domain Checker

Wayback Machine Domain Checker is a tool for SEO specialists, drop-domain hunters, OSINT researchers, and just nostalgic users.
The script downloads archived snapshots of website homepages from Web Archive for a given number of years and saves them as screenshots.

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Table of Contents

• Use Cases
• Features
• How It Works
• Installation
• Usage
• Rendering Modes
• Example Output Structure
• Requirements
• License

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Use Cases

• 🔍 See how a website looked in previous years
• 🧩 Check if a domain contained toxic content, pharma, or gambling in the past
• 🤓 Ensure the domain wasn’t previously used by other SEO specialists
• 🕵️‍♂️ Use it for OSINT research and historical analysis

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Features

• You can set the number of years to check (default: last 5 years)
• The script has three rendering modes (Fast / Balanced / Full) depending on whether you prefer speed or quality

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⚙️ How It Works

1. Add a list of domains to the domains.txt file (one domain per line).
2. Run the script.
3. After the script finishes, screenshots will be saved in domains/<domain_name>/.

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Installation

1. Download the project in one of the following ways:

   • Git instruction:

     git clone https://github.com/birbwatcher/wayback-machine-domain-checker.git

   • ZIP archive instruction:
     Download the .zip archive and extract it manually.

2. Go to the inner wayback-machine-domain-checker folder, where the package.json file is located:

   • If you cloned via Git:

     cd wayback-machine-domain-checker/wayback-machine-domain-checker

   • If you extracted the .zip:

     cd wayback-machine-domain-checker-main/wayback-machine-domain-checker-main

   ⚠️ Important: run all commands from that inner directory (the one containing package.json).

3. Install dependencies:

   npm install

4. Run the script:

   npm start

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🚀 Usage

1. Add domains (one per line) to the domains.txt file:

   example.com
   bbc.com
   nytimes.com
   

2. Run the script:

   npm start

3. Follow the interactive prompts:

   How many years back? (default 5):
   Choose render mode:
     1) ⚡ Fast – minimal waiting
     2) ⚖️  Balanced – default
     3) 🕰  Full – maximum quality
   

4. The ready screenshots will appear in:

   /domains/<domain>/
   

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🧩 Rendering Modes

Mode	Speed	Quality	Description
⚡ Fast	High	Medium	Minimal waiting, suitable for bulk checks
⚖️ Balanced	Medium	Good	Optimal balance between speed and quality
🕰 Full	Slow	Excellent	Maximum waiting for full CSS and font loading

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🖼 Example Output Structure

/domains/
 ├── example.com/
 │    ├── 2025-04.png
 │    └── 2024-06.png
 └── bbc.com/
      ├── 2023-03.png
      └── 2022-05.png

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🛠 Requirements

• Node.js 18+
• Puppeteer 24.15.0+

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📄 License

MIT License © 2025
Created with ❤️ for web historians and internet explorers