Editing Wayback Machine (section)

=== Limitations ===

In 2014, there was a six-month lag time between when a website was crawled and when it became available for viewing in the Wayback Machine.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://archive.org/about/faqs.php |title=Internet Archive Frequently Asked Questions |date=April 2, 2014 |website=Internet Archive |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140402223358/https://archive.org/about/faqs.php |archive-date=April 2, 2014|url-status=dead|access-date=November 23, 2018}}</ref> As of 2024, the lag time is 3 to 10 hours.<ref name="Using" /> The Wayback Machine offers only limited search facilities. Its "Site Search" feature allows users to find a site based on words describing the site, rather than words found on the web pages themselves.<ref name="Bates" />

The Wayback Machine does not include every web page ever made due to the limitations of its web crawler. The Wayback Machine cannot completely archive web pages that contain interactive features such as Flash platforms and forms written in JavaScript and [[progressive web application]]s, because those functions require interaction with the host website. This means that, since approximately July 9, 2013, the Wayback Machine has been unable to display YouTube comments when saving videos' watch pages, as, according to the Archive Team, comments are no longer "loaded within the page itself."<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=YouTube#Comment_loading|website=archiveteam.org|title=YouTube – Archiveteam|access-date=August 6, 2020|archive-date=August 5, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200805184742/https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=YouTube#Comment_loading|url-status=live}}</ref> The Wayback Machine's web crawler has difficulty extracting anything not coded in HTML or one of its variants, which can often result in broken hyperlinks and missing images. Due to this, the web crawler cannot archive "orphan pages" that are not linked to by other pages.<ref name="Bates">{{cite journal |last=Bates |first=Mary Ellen |date=2002 |title=The Wayback Machine |journal=Online |volume=26 |pages=80 }}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=https://archive.org/about/faqs.php |title=Internet Archive Frequently Asked Questions |website=Internet Archive |access-date=October 18, 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130420213122/https://archive.org/about/faqs.php |archive-date=April 20, 2013 |url-status=live }}</ref> The Wayback Machine's crawler only follows a predetermined number of hyperlinks based on a preset depth limit, so it cannot archive every hyperlink on every page.<ref name="Crawls" />