the most annoying thing about the wayback machine

I have just now experienced the periodic displeasure of encountering a dead link. sometimes the website has been neglected to be kept alive. sometimes, some ad spam now lives there. most obnoxiously of all, big companies are able keep their websites up indefinitely, but they have the flagrant tendency to break URLs with abandon.

so, I do what I always do. I type “web.archive.org/” in front of the URL. however, this often does not get me where I want to go. it does not present the most useful version of a page; it presents the latest version, which may even be (and often is) a redirect. I’m catapulted all the way to some nonsense or spam, the new canonical location for the site (but not the page I was looking for), or just the root of the site itself. and so then I have to press the back button possibly several times, copy the URL, and then navigate all the way to the front page of the wayback machine, enter the URL in there, and then sift through history until I find a snapshot that isn’t green.

this also prevents convenient navigation using the navigation bar that it injects onto the page. I select a date, and the snapshot may be a redirect. so I’m shown the page that’s telling me I’m being redirected, which is shown slow enough to be irritating but quickly enough that I often do not manage to cancel it. and then the navigation bar refers to this new page and not the page I’m interested in.

this is all the more exacerbated by the fact that the wayback machine isn’t the most responsive website in general. that in itself does not frustrate me; I understand why it is the case. but the interface isn’t helping.