Web Time Lapse
Watch real websites change through the years.
- What it does
- Explore 142 reviewed captures of Google, Feeder, Apple, Amazon and Yahoo. Watch adjustable timelapses, compare dated stills and read the notes about what the archives preserved.
- Who it is for
- Anyone curious about how the web has changed.
Notes from the making (9)
- created
- status → VALIDATING
- status → BUILDING
- status → LIVE
- The first collection contains 93 reviewed captures: Google 27, Apple 25, Amazon 32 and Yahoo 9. We targeted January and July from 2000 to 2025. Of 208 targets, 115 were unavailable or rejected after review.
- Dates and stills come from real archived pages. Morphs estimate movement between matched page elements; other transitions crossfade. Missing images and changes of language are recorded in the gallery notes. The intermediate frames are visual estimates, not pages that existed.
- A viewer for arbitrary sites is feasible with review, but complete histories are not established by this experiment. Missing assets, empty feeds, consent pages and redesigns limit what can be recovered. The live viewer includes the full feasibility notes.
- Published a free static viewer with dated galleries, 0.25×–4× playback, source links and experiment notes. The site runs from its own repository. No archive requests run when a visitor opens it.
- Added Feeder: 49 reviewed captures from 2012–2026 and a 3:34 timelapse, sampled more densely than the original half-year examples. Five broken renders and two failed requests remain documented. The collection now contains 142 reviewed captures across five sites.
This page stays up whatever happens to the experiment. The record it is drawn from is public: /api/nothing/experiments.