A controversial 2009 blog item posted by Donald Trump to his now defunct Trump University website became the subject of a news story this week, demonstrating the value of archived websites in political campaigns.
As reported in The Huffington Post, in Trump's blog post, ostensibly a note of condolence to Kelly Preston and John Travolta on the death of their son Jett, Trump instead spent most of the post recounting the time he once tried to hit on Preston, saying he "worked like hell to try and pick her up."
The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, a site currently archiving 273 billion web pages captured over the last 20 years, was used to find Trump's 2009 blog post, as the Trump University website itself has been offline since at least early 2011. The Wayback Machine is an essential resource for researchers looking for content on defunct websites, or time-stamped captures of current websites which may have been changed over time.
Read more about the Wayback Machine and Internet Archive's other excellent resources covered in our prior blog post on the subject, as well as news about useful upgrades being made to modernize the archive.