webarchives is a Python module for easily determining if a given URL is available from a known Web archiving project. The idea is that it could be handy in situations where you have a URL, but the URL no longer resolves, and you would like to see the content. Web archiving projects are being run by national libraries, archives and non-profits that are part of the International Internet Preservation Consortium.
The genesis for webarchives was work done by the Memento Project on the Memento Proxy which provided the seed for the scraping backend modules used by webarchives.
The webarchives module provides a function lookup, which you pass a url that
you want to lookup in the Web archives. lookup will return a list of
(time, url) tuples. Each tuple represents when the requested url was
archived and where the archived representation can be retrieved from.
import webarchives
print webarchives.lookup("http://www.geocities.com/homestead/homedir.html")