Wayback Machine

If you are what we like to call a "full-fledged web geek," then you certainly know all about The Internet Archive. For those of you who don't know, the team behind the previously-mentioned nonprofit digital library make it their duty to preserve incredible amounts of useful data that would be otherwise gone forever.

Regardless of you being a simple user who has stumbled upon a dead web page or you being a natively curious individual who just wants to explore the history of the web, The Internet Archive, and their awesome Wayback Machine can definitely lend a helping hand.

If Google Chrome is your weapon of choice when it comes to browsing the Internet, then you can take advantage of a useful extension called Wayback Machine, that allows you to view archived versions of any dead webpage with just one click.

As with all Chrome extensions, it can be installed from the Chrome Web Store with the least amount of effort on your behalf. You should be able to catch a glimpse of its small icon, located on the right side of Chrome's address bar.

Having said this, here's how it works: each time you access a once-alive website which now displays the annoying "Page Not Found" message or the generally hated 404 error, the extension automatically checks whether there's a valid archive in the Wayback Machine.

If you're lucky, you'll be greeted by a compact extension-related window that conveniently takes you directly to the latest archived version of the website, with no more than a single click.

Just for the sake of being as informative as possible, we will also mention that this lightweight and useful extension can perform these automated searches not only if it detects the 404 error code. In fact, it can also perform searches when dealing with 408, 410, 451, 500, 502, 503, 504, 509, 520, 521, 523, 524, 525, and 526 error codes.

In conclusion, Wayback Machine is clearly one of the most useful Chrome extensions for web content hunters or everyday users that are invariably dealing with webpages that are no longer available.